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GOD'S REQUIREMENTS 

OTHER SERMONS. 



EEV. E. H: CHAPIN", DD., 

PASTOR OB 1 THE CHURCH OP THE DIVINE PATERNITY". 



if 

1 A 



m 20 )m 



KETV YORK : 

JAMES MILLER, PUBLISHER, 
779 Bboadwat. 
1881. 




COPTEIGHT, 

1881, 

By JAMES MILLER, 



PRESS OF J. J. LITTLE & CO., 
N03. 19 TO 20 ASTOR PLACE, NEW YORK. 



PUBLISHER'S 



NOTICE. 



It is believed that the many thousand admirers of 
the author will all, or nearly all, appreciate the advan- 
tage of possessing these valuable sermons in a form 
that they may continue to preach to their children and 
children's children. And what legacy could be more 
appropriate to leave to the rising generation than all 
that can be collected of the burning words that came 
from the great heart of this gifted divine ? 

The Publisher is happily free from the necessity of 
speaking in the modest terms which the author em- 
ploys in reference to this volume, and believes he ex- 
presses the opinion of a large majority of Dr. Chapin's 
friends in saying that, while all must admire the high 
order of his written sermons, they will find in these 
discourses the additional charm of those spontaneous 
bursts of eloquence which proceed from the inspiration 
of the moment, and which render his extemporaneous 
efforts so popular with his hearers. It may be proper 
also to state, that most of these sermons were taken 
down by two different reporters, whose published re- 
ports have been carefully compared, and any omissions 
of importance on either side are embraced in the book. 



PREFACE. 



The Discourses in the present volume were taken 
down from off-hand delivery, and are, I presume, as 
correct a reproduction of what I said at the time as 
can be given of the ideas of one who speaks as rapidly 
as I do. I cannot, however, vouch for the language 
in all instances. Indeed, these Discourses are likely 
to exhibit at least the faults of extemporaneous pro- 
ductions ; and there are undoubtedly forms of speech, 
and entire passages, which would have appeared in a 
different shape had they been carefully penned in my 
study, instead of being struck out upon the instant at 
white heat. In extemporaneous discourses, too, more 
than in written ones, must we miss the personal mag- 
netism and the force of delivery, which give them a 
peculiar influence at the time when they are spoken. 
However, I have looked over the contents of these 
pages, with some attempts at revision, and, such as 
they are, I now send them forth, trusting that God 
may bless them, and they may help to do His work. 

E. H. CHAPIN. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. God's Requirements 7 

II. A New Heart 27 

III. Love of the World 45 

IY. Longing for Righteousness 65 

Y. Life in Christ 87 

YI. The Pattern est the Mount 109 

YIL Faith and its Aspirations 131 

YIII. Conceptions of Religion 153 

IX. The Bread of life 173 

X. Joy of the Angels 197 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 



GOD'S REQUIREMENTS. 



. And what doth the Lord require of thee, hut to do justly, and to 
love mercy, and to walk humhly with thy God ? — Micah vi. 8, 



HE consummate result of all education consists in 



JL the power of applying a few scientific principles. 
All the possibilities of literature are enfolded in the al- 
phabet. The most abstruse and bewildering calcula- 
tions, ciphering up in columns and platoons of figures, 
are only the combination of familiar units. Out of one 
clear rule or method spring all the products of this 
branching and luxuriant science. So the highest art 
and achievement of man's life is but the flowering of 
one or two germinal truths. Stately philosophies and 
complex creeds may be reduced to a proposition that 
can be written in the palm of the hand. So far as 
they are genuine, so far as they have any real force 
to help us concerning the great end of our being, this 




3 EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

is the sum and substance of them all ; they are redu- 
cible in the last analysis to this : " Do justly, love 
mercy, and walk humbly with thy God." 

These, you will see at once, are requirements very 
easy to understand — worth whole tons of sermons and 
dissertations. These, the wayfaring man, though a fool, 
may comprehend. And yet, my friends, these are pre- 
cepts which whole tons of sermons and dissertations, 
somehow or another, have not yet made practical in 
the hearts and lives of men. It is the application of 
the theory that is requisite ; for there is a vast differ- 
ence between principles to be applied, and the power 
of applying principles ; just as there is a difference 
between the alphabet and the Iliad of Homer; be- 
tween the first signs in algebra and the calculations of 
Leibnitz ; between the school-boy's lesson and the 
achievements of Newton. Anybody can read the prop- 
ositions in the text, but who converts them into flow- 
ers of the soul, and products of daily life ? Words 
easily said are these, but what is the essence of them, 
and what do they call upon us to do ? I maintain that 
they unfold and point out the entire essence of religion 
— vital, evangelical religion. 

Some people seem to entertain a dread of plain prop- 
ositions. They do not like to have religion put in sim- 
ple words ; they want it left with some vagueness and 
complexity mingled with it. The moment it is put in 
plain and simple words like these in the text, they begin 
to suspect it of being merely natural religion, or theol- 



GOD'S REQUIREMENTS. 9 

ogy — at best, only good morality. They miss the vital- 
ity of religion, as they call it. There is nothing in these 
words, for instance, concerning terms of salvation, or 
faith in the atonement. There is no peculiar phrase- 
ology which covers up and envelops what to many 
seems to be the very essence of religious teaching. 
But we may be pretty sure that all the essence and 
vitality of religion is here. What right have we to 
add anything to it ? For " what doth the Lord require 
of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God ?" What else ? If any one 
misses in these words any of the necessary elements of 
a religious life, he may be sure the fault is in himself, 
and not in the capacity of the teaching in the text. 
Christ is here ; because who can do justly, love mercy, 
and walk humbly with his Maker, without that com- 
munion with Christ Jesus, and that inspiration of his 
spirit, by which alone we are strengthened and guided 
to do these things ? 

I repeat, this is religion — its vitality, its essence, and 
its power, set forth in this simple proposition. And, 
my friends, what an advantage there is in having 
religion set before us in a simple proposition ! For I 
am inclined to think that one reason why people are 
not more practically religious is, that they do not abso- 
lutely comprehend what religion is. It is covered up 
to them in the vagueness of technicalities. It is like a 
science ; they do not enter into it because they can not 
get over the bristling terminology that stands around 

1* 



iO 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 



it. They feel that in order to do so they must climb 
up between these thorny propositions and dogmas ; 
and therefore seeing it thus fenced up and covered 
over, they do not get into its heart and life. Could 
they feel how real it is, how it strikes upon the thought 
and want of the heart, how it comes to them in its 
plain, substantial garb in the Bible, I think there 
would be more practical religion. 

I say, what an advantage there is in having such a 
condensed statement of religion ! It is a pocket edition 
of God's truth that we can wear nearest to our hearts, 
and look at with a glance. When men are perplexed 
and confused, as they often are about duty ; when they 
do not know which way they should go ; when they 
begin to be curious, prying into their own souls, work- 
ing down with probes of introspection into the depths 
of their own hearts, starting spiritual problems that 
scare them, it is a good thing to stop a moment and 
put the question to themselves, " What doth the Lord 
require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to 
walk humbly with thy God ?" It clears up things ; it 
is like getting a glimpse of a star in heaven, and taking 
our latitude and longitude, when we have been drift- 
ing about on the dark waves of doubt. And so when 
men get mixed up with speculations, when they think 
it behooves them to have every possible dogma of the 
intellect set straight ; when they are anxious to see 
exactly how things are, to have all the great truths of 
God and the universe linked by a chain of logical 



GOD'S EEQUIEEMENTS. 



11 



sequence in their minds ; when they begin to ask 
themselves questions about the origin of matter, free- 
will, Divine necessity, and the sin of Adam, and get 
tangled up in these things, as if the life of religion 
depended upon deciding such questions — how good 
it is again to stop a moment and inquire, "What is 
my practical duty here on earth ? What are my rela- 
tions to God and my fellow-men? It may be very 
well, as an exercise of the intellect, to enter into these 
speculations and inquiries, but it is a more prac- 
tical and useful question, "What doth the Lord re- 
quire of me to-day ?" You can do this if you can not 
settle the question of free-will, Divine sovereignty, and 
all those perplexing dogmas. Here is a plain, sub- 
stantial truth ; and is it not good sometimes to have 
such an arrow of God as the simple question of the 
text sent right into the heart and conscience ? 

But, at the same time, we must remember that the 
words of the text set forth no light affair for our per- 
formance. As in other departments, so here the grand- 
est results are but a combination of a few simple 
elements. If you will observe what is actually con- 
tained in these words, you will find what the essence 
of all right doing, right feeling, and right living is. 
The text expresses nothing less than all morality, all 
philanthropy, all religion. I think, therefore, I am 
right in saying that it expresses the essence of all vital 
religion, and the highest spiritual life. 

In the first place, I say, that all morality is ex- 



12 EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOTTESES. 

pressed m the text. The essence and foundation 
principle of morality is involved in the precept, 
" Do justly." It is a compact summary of all social 
duty, binding us not only to legal exactness, but to 
absolute rectitude, and yielding to no other court of 
final resort the authority of the court of conscience. 
It lays its injunctions upon us in solitude and in dark- 
ness, as if our actions were read and known. It abol- 
ishes all standards of mere selfish advantage and 
worldly policy, commanding us to do the just, the 
true, the righteous thing, whatever may come of it in 
the way of personal or temporal consequences. There 
is no relation in which we ought to stand to our neigh- 
bor, to society, to the world around us, no affection 
that we ought to entertain for our fellow-men, nothing 
that we ought to do concerning him, before his face or 
behind his back, in his knowledge or in his ignorance, 
not summed up in these words, " Do justly." That is 
all that is required of you. In the mart, in the work- 
shop, in the counting-room, in the office, in public and 
private, that is all that is required of you. Be just, 
clear down to the sockets of your soul — in thought, in 
deed, in word, in hand, in brain, in heart. 

It will not do merely to mumble these words over, 
and say, " Do justly," in a flippant way. Here is a 
requirement for a man to test his conduct by, to take 
as a lamp wherewith to search himself even to the in- 
nermost depths. 

The first thing to consider in doing this is, What is 



GOD'S EEQUIEEMENTS. 



my idea of justice ? Does it seem limited to the mere 
scope of legal censure ? It seems so to some ; their 
standard of justice seems limited to the point at which 
the law can not take hold of them or make them suf- 
fer, no matter whether they impede the rule of right, 
and thwart absolute justice or not. 

It would be very singular if this great elastic shad-net 

, of the law did not enable them to catch at something 
balking for the time the eternal flood-tide of justice. 
Oh, what a vast difference between law and justice — 
between human enactments and God's everlasting re- 
quirements ! Sorrow for us if all existing laws were 
the representatives of God's justice, as men sometimes 
pompously say. 

Is your idea of justice that which is legal, merely — 
that which the law will enable you to do ? Pay twen- 
ty-five cents on a dollar, when you ought to pay a 
hundred, if the law will only let you % Screw the last 
cent out of a poor man who stands before you in the 
naked appeal of his poverty, because it is legal ? Turn 

! the widow and children out of doors, because you have 
a legal right to do it ? If anything could surprise God 
Almighty (I speak it with reverence), it must be this. 
He must look with pitying wonder to see how his chil- 
dren, who every moment depend on his mercy for their 
very breath, impudently strut forth, in the name of 
justice, and claim their rights with a hard, unbending, 
unyielding heart. Is it your idea of justice to set up 
your individual will, your selfish standard, regulated 



14 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

only by parchment laws, no matter what the spirit 
of civilization, no matter what the general good de- 
mands ? Do yon, in your conception of justice, set 
the sum total of your profits against the sum total 
of human welfare ? Will you deliver up Jesus Christ, 
or the image of him in humanity, to the authorities for 
thirty pieces of silver, and call that justice? I repeat, 
is it not sickening to think how men caricature divine 
justice, and claim to be its representatives ? Oh, no, 
my friends, law is not always justice, and by slipping 
into some little knot-hole of legal technicality, we do 
not escape the requisition in the text. It is a very 
sublime precept — " Do justice." Oh, how it goes 
down into the world's heart, and strikes the world's 
conscience ? How it smites the world's sin ! How it 
touches almost every fiber of our social organization, re- 
buking and commanding us to do justice ! The justice 
that stands forever on God's side, insisting upon the 
right, the ancient, eternal right, with its clear, awful 
eyes burning away every sophistry of individual souls, 
is very different from the justice that is meted out by 
courts and juries. 

With others, justice only means the stem thing, the 
severe thing — eye for eye, tooth for tooth — give back 
as good a blow as you receive — that serves any one 
right — let them have the full force that they gave — that 
is justice for them. Away with this puling senti- 
mentality about mercy ; drive a stem plowshare clear 
through the human heart, and strike out every truth 



GOD'S REQUIREMENTS. 



15 



that Jesus Christ has planted there ; that is justice in 
the idea of many. In this way a man gets a good 
chance to deify his own passions, and thinks he is 
doing God service. Thus a strong nation, under the 
pretext of some petty insult from a weaker nation, 
stalks forth with a desolating army, and teaches it 
justice with belching fire and gunpowder. 

Sometimes men reverse this a very little ; they do 
not exactly give blow for blow, but they manage in 
some other way, by some sting of reproach, or some 
obnoxious word, to get their revenge. They are after 
their revenge all the while. Even when they profess 
to be Christians, some men take up the very code of 
Christ, which requires them to return good for evil, 
and endeavor not so much to do good to those that 
injure them as to get revenge. They heap coals of 
fire on their enemy's head in order to love him ; but 
they are very much disappointed if the coals do not 
scorch. Now justice is often a severe thing, but it 
is never a brutal thing, never a fierce thing. More 
than this, strange as it may seem, justice is a merciful 
thing. This calling down fire from heaven, this giving 
blow for blow, may satisfy the mere savage, uncul- 
tivated sentiment of man's heart, but, after all, it does 
not do the work of true justice. True justice rec- 
tifies and sets things right; blow for blow deranges 
and sets things wrong. It entails a perpetuity of evil; 
revenge follows revenge. When we take in, not mere- 
ly the good that comes to society, but all the final 



EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUESE9. 

results, we see a great difference between the opera- 
tions of God's justice and what man dignifies with that 
name. JSTo, my friends, the essence of justice is mercy. 
You make a child suffer for wrong-doing ; that is mer- 
ciful to the child, There is no mercy in letting the 
child have its own will, plunging headlong with the 
bits in its mouth, to destruction. There is no mercy to 
society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed 
and the right vindicated. Tou injure the soul of the 
culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the 
bar of justice, if you do not make him feel that he has 
done a wrong thing. Tou may deliver his body from 
the prison, but not at the expense of justice, nor to his 
own injury. 

Mercy, good-will — that is always the spirit of 
justice, depend upon it. Though sometimes it is se- 
vere, yet it is never merciless. Sometimes justice 
requires us to be merciful in expression and action, 
as well as in feeling and motive. " Love thy neigh- 
bor as thyself;" that is justice. It is a merciful, 
tender, beautiful sentiment. It is the justice of char- 
ity — of construing others' acts by that standard in 
your own breast which shows how much there is to 
palliate and excuse. Interpret the lives and conduct 
of others by the best possible motive ; give the most 
allowance to their transgressions that you can ; that is 
what you wish them to do to you — not press the hard- 
est construction. "What a savage thing this is in so- 
ciety ! A man does an apparent wrong ; he is sure to 



GOD'S REQUIREMENTS. y[ 

have the harshest motive ascribed to him — the whole 
of his sin forced into his motive. In order to do justly 
we should construe the conduct of others as we would 
have our own conduct construed by them. 

Let not that man think that he fulfills the requisi- 
tion of the text who only keeps what he calls an even 
balance with his fellow-men— pays what he owes, gives 
back exactly what he receives, and no more. There is 
no man that keeps an even balance in this way. He 
does not hold an even balance ; every man wants 
mercy of his fellow men — a large amount of credit — ■ 
and, construing others in this way, he wants this ele- 
ment of mercy to mingle in his justice. That, in the 
true sense, is justice ; you can not stand in this bal- 
anced way of merely paying for what you get, and 
sending back as good as you receive. 

I think thus you will see that all social morality 
is indicated in the text. It absorbs so much of our 
being as is occupied in doing. Do justly. It is a 
lesson that God has set in two words, but it may take 
man all his life to learn it. All action should be just 
action. Drive a nail, plane a board, cut a garment, 
sell a piece of cloth, carve a statue, preach a sermon — 
whatever you do, do it faithfully, as by contract. Do 
justly. Though you may cover up your conduct 
from human eyes, and make a good thing of it, so 
far as your immediate welfare is concerned, God 
Almighty sees all the blurs, scars, and flaws, every 
little neglect, and he says to you, in everything. Do 



23 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

justly. Is not that the basis of all morality, public 
and private ? 

In the next place there comes before us. in the text, 
a requisition which calls for all the life and power of 
the most genuine philanthropy. "We have seen how 
the text bears upon morality. " Love mercy." I ob- 
serve, by the way, that there seems to be in the state- 
ment of the text, not merely a collocation of duties, one 
linked upon the other, but there seems to be in it 
an analytical sequence, from the fundamental to the 
elementary and causal. Thus, do justly, comes first; 
but, in order to do this, we must take a step back — we 
must love mercy, and the essence of both is to walk 
humbly with our God. It all blends together in one 
organic whole. 

Here comes in, as you will perceive, the element 
of feeling coupled with doing. Doing justly is the 
work — loving is a matter of feeling. In all good and 
true performances there must be affection. We can 
not stand, for instance, in cold, formal relations to men 
and be really just to them. You can not walk among 
men, icy and hard, without any impression of their 
life, without any sense of their need, without any pity 
for their infirmities, and at the same time be just to 
them. Out of philanthropy springs justice, as, in its 
highest form, that springs out of the ocean-depths of 
God's love. People sneer at philanthropy sometimes, 
call it mere sentiment, mere weak feeling concerning the 
woes and wants of man. It is not mere sentiment. 



GOD'S REQUIREMENTS. ^9 

The grandest justice in this world is that which is con- 
ceived by the spirit of an earnest, toiling humanity. 
When philanthropy stands upon its true basis it will 
not stand upon the common ground of mere alms-giv- 
ing charity, but of justice. Do justly to the poor ; 
that is all you are required to do. Do justly to your 
fellow-men who are weak ; do justly to the oppressed. 
The true cry of philanthropy is a burning watchword 
ringing all round the world, requiring justice between 
man and man. What is the essence of philanthropy ? 
It comes from the warm sympathy which great hearts 
feel for man, because they are implicated with hu- 
manity, feel its life, and know what its woes and wants 
are. It is a great cry for justice, and not for mere 
charity. 

For all good and noble ends we ought to love mercy. 
There can be no beneficent power in this world that 
does not spring from love. Love mercy, which, 
though often dictating and requiring the severest 
measures of justice, rejoices when it need not be so. 
Tes, it rejoices in forgiveness and renunciation; re- 
joices when the presumed guilty are found innocent. 
There is' often a feeling of disappointment in some 
minds when a man pronounced guilty is found inno- 
cent. All the excitement, all the romance of the case 
is gone. True mercy rejoices when it need not be so ; 
is glad to palliate when it can. Like Christ on the 
cross, the merciful man says, " Father, forgive them, 
they know not what they do." Oh, how much sublime 



20 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 



tenderness appears in those words ! Was this a cover- 
ing up of sin ? Some people think it a weakness for a 
man not to let justice have its course. Let it have its 
course in its severest form when it must, but it is justice 
to palliate when you can and when you ought. Jesus 
Christ in that expression on the cross did not cover up 
anything. Those fierce soldiers thrust the spear into 
him ; they knew not what they did ; but it took all 
of Jesus Christ's spirit to see that fact and to look up 
with his nailed hands and bleeding face to God, and 
say, " Oh, Father, they know not what they do ; par- 
don them. 5 ' And this is the essence of all mercy. 

It is always the case, my friends, that they who have 
really the love of mercy in them, while they must 
sometimes enforce the sterner measures of justice, re- 
joice when they can palliate. And here is the great 
power of men with their fellow-men ; here is the re- 
deeming power which God sends into the world — the 
power of sympathy, of being one with humanity, of 
taking hold of and finding out that which is best. In 
this way have all great and good things been wrought. 
It is this spirit that has led men to death, to sacrifice 
for humanity, and has given them all the power they 
had. You never can lift men up and bring them into 
God's kingdom by any other way than loving them, 
and implicating yourself with them. 

During the past week we have had a most extraor- 
dinary spectacle, so extraordinary in its character that 
it rises above the topic of a mere literary festival, and 



GOD'S REQUIREMENTS. 21 

I must tkke the liberty therefore to advert to it even in 
the pulpit. I allude to the honors paid to the Scottish 
plowman and poet. What is the meaning of these 
demonstrations ? They were not merely honors paid to 
a literary man ; such a man could not receive such 
honors ; he never could have awakened such feelings. 
N or were they honors merely to the poetry of Burns. 
Sweet and beautiful as it is, it was the humanity of 
the man that kindled all this feeling. His great heart 
took in and sent out in a mighty gulf-stream an ocean- 
tide of common humanity. Men will always feel a 
respect and reverence for that. It will cover up a 
great many sins. Mankind will pass over many 
shortcomings- when they write the epitaph of a great 
heart. They will respond to that which he has ut- 
tered. And some day, they will stop the belching of 
the cannon, forget their nationalities, and feel in the 
glow of such an awakening as that as though they were 
one great human brotherhood. 

Here is the power by which the world is to be re- 
deemed — the power of getting into our own humanity, 
and feeling for it. You may say, TThat a poor, mis- 
erable, abominable creature man is ! you may stop at 
some revelation of social horror and say, TThat a hell 
there is in man! but that is not the way to redeem 
him. You have got to search for something below the 
hell — to dive deep into the essence of humanity and 
uncover that. Many people are accustomed to think 
that the religion of Jesus Christ is a worship of the 



22 EXTEMPOBANEOUS DISCOUPwSES. 

high and a desecration of the low; that on the one 
hand it is an external form and ceremony, a compliment 
to God, and on the other it is pointing out man as a 
being totally depraved, and saying, " See what a poor, 
corrupt, degenerate creature he is !" The whole es- 
sence of such worship appears either in ecclesiastical 
forms, or in a stern, harsh theology. The worship of 
Jesus Christ is not the worship of what is high and 
the degrading of what is low ; it is a condescension of 
the high and a lifting up of the low — Christ coming 
down to man, the meanest man, searching under all the 
corruption and refuse of humanity, finding his heart, 
taking it up in his nailed-pierced hand, and saying, 
"God forgive him, he knows not what he does." It 
is not an abstraction ; it has been exemplified in Jesus 
Christ. 

Moreover, as doing justice involves the essence of all 
action, I suppose mercy is the essence of all love. The 
mother of the little child at first feels strange instincts 
in her heart. Her love has taken no form other than 
that of mercy to a little helpless being cast upon the 
heaving billows of her own bosom. If you find a fam- 
ily where there is a poor, little, weak child, it is beloved 
more than all the rest. If you want to love your fel- 
low-men, have mercy on them. "When even an enemy 
comes before you, and all power to hurt you is gone, you 
can forgive and love him. And so I suppose we may 
say that the love of God for poor, weak man is mercy 
for him. Guilty, sinful, degraded as he is, the infinite 



GOD'S EEQUIEEMENTS. 23 

mercy throbs for him. Loving mercy is the spring of 
all right feeling, as doing justly is of all right being. 

The final requirement is to be religious — to walk 
humbly with thy God. Speaking according to ana- 
lytical sequence, neither to be just nor merciful is 
the primal thing, for we can not do so unless we come 
into communion with the spirit of Almighty God. 
We can not do a right thing only as we are inspired to 
do it. This shows us not only what we are to do and 
to feel, but what we are to be ; and this is of more con- 
sequence, because it is primary. To walk humbly 
with our God shows us the primal spring of all we can 
do or feel. You know how much stress Jesus Christ 
laid upon this point. He said, " A good tree can not 
bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring 
forth good fruit." This is a fact of primary conse- 
quence, and it depends upon our becoming one with 
God and walking with him ; in other words, walking 
reverently and humbly. And this is certainly the 
very essence of all true religion — to walk humbly with 
God. Is it not a beautiful as well as a thrilling thought ? 
Some scholars would render the text, " TTalk humbly 
before God but I think it is more accordant with 
the spirit of the Bible when we take it the other way. 
because it is the peculiarity of the Bible that it makes 
God a personality, brings him down into communion 
with men. Philosophy demonstrates and proves that 
there is a God by a slow logical process, and finally 
lifts you up on a great platform where you can take a 



24 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

telescopic view of the Almighty. Then there, is a kin 
of Oriental mysticism which meditates about God, 
which stands afar off and gazes upon the effluence of 
his glory. The religion of the Bible makes ns to walk 
with God. It gives ns a sense of a personal relation to 
him. The Bible is full of it. The Psalms all overrun 
with it, and that is the reason why they live forever, 
and are read more than any other part of the Old 
Testament. They are all glowing with a sense of the 
personal presence of God. They make us feel that 
affection, wisdom, goodness are not abstractions, but 
qualities of a kindred personality. That is the pecu- 
liarity of the Bible. It makes God a kindred person- 
ality ; he hears our prayers and consorts with our 
weakness. There is a personal God revealed in the 
Bible, with whom we may commune and walk, as we 
do. "We become like him, and we obtain, therefore, 
in ourselves the real springs and powers of all good 
feeling and all good action. The essence of religion is 
in walking humbly with God ; while we do this and 
when we do this we shall love mercy, we shall do 
justly. 

Now, my friends, I ask you if the requisitions in the 
text, so simple and so easy in the memory and upon 
the lips, are not like most simple things, of great value 
and importance ? Exactly as I said in the commence- 
ment, in regard to the alphabet, that all literature is 
in it ; or, like the simple figures one learns in the 
multiplication or addition table — they contain the el©- 



GOD'S REQUIREMENTS. 25 

ments of the most abstruse computations. But the 
thing is to apply the principles. That requires power 
— just as Homer applied the Greek alphabet, by the 
inspiration that was in him, to that wondrous epic 
that lives forever ; just as Xewton took the knowledge 
of figures and transmuted them into such wondrous 
results. This is the process of education so far as 
man's intellect is concerned. Education is the power 
that enables men to apply the alphabet to the results 
of literature, and figures to the results of mathematics. 
But there is something required which is more than 
mere exercise of the intellect — it is the surrender and 
sanctification of the will and the affections. All who 
yield their will and affections to the spirit that was in 
Christ, come under the requisition of the text. It is a 
surrendering, a transfiguration, a regeneration of the 
heart that brings men into a position in which they 
can walk humbly with God, do justly, and love mercy. 
Think of the greatness of these results, where one 
walks humbly with God. What do you think of a 
being that can veritably walk with God day by day, 
hour by hour, in communion with that infinite spirit, 
lifted up, inspired, glorified by it, beyond all material- 
ism, shallow atheism, and false and degrading notions 
of man? What a privilege, what a delight to be able 
to walk with anything higher than ourselves ! What 
a power to be capable of walking with Gocl ! Some 
men do not w^alk at all, they are so much in the bond- 
age of sins and cares. To walk with something good 

2 



2g EXTEMPOKANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

and excellent, as a pnpil with a teacher ; to walk with. 
ISTature in all its glorious manifestations ; to walk with 
her when the summer flower lifts up its face to the 
sky ; to walk with the great and good men, the living 
and the dead, is a great thing. But God is the inspi- 
ration of all human excellence, the quickener of all 
human thought ; and when we can walk with him we 
do not need anything else ; we can walk with him 
everywhere. The obscure, the weak, the lowly, all 
have this blissful privilege of walking with him in 
sorrow, in trial, in the hurry and rush of daily life ; 
and in the last hour, when this body, like a garment, 
shrivels and drops away, and we go up to the eternal 
fields, upon heights of glory and of power, forever 
and forever onward and upward, we shall walk with 
God. 



A NEW 



HEART. 



Make you a new heart and a right spirit, — Ezekiel xviii. 31. 

THESE were the words which the Lord, through the 
lips of the prophet, addressed in mingled tones of 
warning and encouragement to the rebellious house 
of Israel ; but they are words fitted to the ears and to 
the souls of communities and individuals in all times. 
They break upon us to-day. Each of us may interpret 
them according to his own need and condition. " ]VIake 
you a new heart and a new spirit. 

Let me proceed to observe, in the first place, that 
this is an exhortation which, in one form or another, 
every man needs to hear. There are a great many 
theories, my friends, which are rendered almost super- 
fluous by actual facts, and it is sad to think how much 
of our theorizing — of our religious theorizing especially 
— is practically useless, and worse than useless — how 
much of it is mere waste and hindrance, because we 
do not theorize and work at the same time ; but our 
theorizing prevents our working. Here is a man who 
has to cross a river. There is no difficulty in crossing 



28 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

— the fridge is there — it is plain and palpable ; but he 
stops to speculate how the bridge could have been 
erected — how it could span the river — and he goes 
still deeper into subtilties, and speculates how it is 
possible that he has the power of crossing it, and all 
the while neglects the work before him in theories 
that amount to no practical value, if they ever could 
be decided. 

]STow here is a simple, practical work set before a 
man — to make himself a new heart and a new spirit. 
So far as man's own immediate action is concerned, there 
is little reason why he should perplex himself with 
controversies or questionings about human ability and 
total depravity. I do not say that the truth or false- 
hood of these theories is not an important consideration. 
The truth or falsehood of any theory is important that 
bears upon spiritual realities, and colors all our views 
of God and life and duty. This is the value of doc- 
trinal truth. 'Not that it gives us intellectual or logical 
consistency ; not that it constitutes a sharp-edged sys- 
tem with which we can win a controversy ; but it is 
valuable because of the great truths it clears up, and 
the different stand-points from which we may look upon 
God, our own souls, our own relations, possibilities, and 
powers. But I say no man need trouble himself long 
with theories, so far as his own immediate duty is con- 
cerned, in this demand for practical action ; for whether 
he be tainted with Adam's sin or not, he is a sinner; 
whether he be totally depraved or not, there is enough 



A NEW HEART. 



29 



over-balancing evil in him, enough, of wrong affections 
and triumphant sin, to excite him to endeavor to make 
for himself a new heart and a new spirit. 

So this exhortation before us is no mere historical 
saying, fossilized in the past — bound up with the his- 
tory of the rebellious Jews. It is a living word, and 
speaks at this very hour, vibrating from heaven through- 
out every soul: "Make you a new heart and a new 
spirit. 53 

Another question may be disposed of, when we con- 
sider how practical this appeal is, and that is the ques- 
tion of, "Who makes a new heart ? Do you make it, or 
does God make it? How a little further back in this 
same book of Ezekiel, we find God's agency brought 
pre-eminently forward, when He says: "I will give 
them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you ; 
and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and 
will give them an heart of flesh." jSTow here, as almost 
everywhere else, we find two poles to one truth, one 
referring to God, and one to man, but the moment we 
come to act, they are reconciled. If one warms into 
earnest effort upon the idea of having a new heart and 
a new spirit, the two conditions of God's agency and 
man's agenoy will melt together. If he stand still in 
cold, barren speculation, he freezes to death. God does 
something, and you have something to do in this 
achievement of making a new heart and a new spirit. 
The Apostle puts the two agencies close enough together, 
I think, when he says — " Work out your own salvation, 



30 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

for it is God that worketh in you to will and to do." 
JSow there is no more difficulty about the theory of 
making a new heart, or entering upon a religious life, 
than there is about anything else, the moment we enter 
earnestly into action. But it certainly seems a very 
perplexing and discouraging procedure to keep urging 
a man to turn from evil, and get rid of his bad habits 
and affections— to make himself a new heart and a new 
spirit — and then to add that he can do nothing for him- 
self, but must wait the breath and influence of God — 
must wait until God gives him a new heart and spirit. 
As I said last Sunday, so I take occasion to say now, 
that I verily believe that one reason why people stand 
aloof so much from the religious life, from entering 
heartily and earnestly into it, is the fact that it has been 
presented in such a vague and perplexing way, and en- 
cumbered with so many speculations ; so that we have 
really a kind of preaching which urges upon men the 
great guilt of their sin and their alienation from God, 
and then tells them that they can do nothing of them- 
selves. And I repeat this is all borne away by the 
simple condition, that a man must be in earnest in re- 
gard to this new heart and spirit. And it is a mistake 
to suppose that God is not glorified when we dwell 
upon the point of human action. When we say you 
can make a new heart and a new spirit, it is a great 
mistake to suppose that we take the glory from God. 
For whence come all good desires and all right actions ? 
They proceed from God, and from Him alone. And so 



A NEW HEAKT. 31 

do all strength and all ability. One of the greatest in- 
tellectual errors into which a man can fall, is the habit 
of ignoring the divine in the common, and looking for 
it only in the special and unfamiliar, not to see God in 
the ordinary machinery of action, not to behold Him 
in ordinary processes ; but if something strange bursts 
upon us, something not in accordance with the usual 
course of events, then to recognize the divine. It is 
not the thing itself, its utility, its beauty, its power, 
that stamps it as divine — only its strangeness. 

Tou see in this tendency the danger that we are apt 
to encounter. The moment we can discover the law 
of the event, the moment we find it taking its place in 
the order of natural sequence, it becomes no longer 
divine ; and so, by-and-by, all nature becomes atheistic. 
There was a time when almost every phenomenon in 
nature was unaccounted for, and everything was called 
divine ; but as fast as its law was discovered, and it took 
its place in the order of natural sequence, the thing 
was no more divine ; that only which was mysterious 
and unknown being placed in that category. And so 
as the torch of investigation advances farther and far- 
ther into the realms of nature's laws, men could limit 
the divine and at length eliminate it from all things. 
No, my friends, the truest philosophy is that which 
recognizes everything as divine; that sees in all laws, 
in all constituted order, in the flow of common events, 
in the movements of familiar things, the Divine hand, 
the Divine presence and power, just as much as in the 



g2 EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

strange and maryelous that startle the mind and weigh 
it down with awe. 

I repeat : all strength, all ability, is from God. A 
man does not get an education, any more than a new 
heart, of himself. Is it not Providence that furnishes 
the circumstances which may incite him to the pursuit 
of an education, and help him to get it? Is it not 
Providence that touches the mysterious processes of the 
mind by which education becomes possible? Kow 
suppose we should say, "This matter of getting a new 
heart is a process of self-education;" it would be re- 
duced to simple terms, and yet a great many would 
start from it and say, "This won't do ; it is too cold and 
naturalistic — too much of human agency to call getting 
religion a process of self-education." And yet what 
is self-education but the inspiration and the life of the 
divine? Ton do not strike God out when you put 
human agency in. In reality this is the sum of the 
matter ; self-education in the Christian spirit and Chris- 
tian life, is the process of getting a new heart and a 
new spirit with the Divine agency implicated with it, 
and apparent in it. A man does not steer a ship, does 
not sow a seed, does not lay a brick, of himself; God 
works with him; implicated, in the last analysis, in 
the mysterious action both of the mind and body. 
"Why will we turn divine inspiration out of the broad 
area of human affairs and limit it only to the Bible ? 
Grant that, in a fuller and more peculiar measure, it 
flowed into him who penned the Psalms and those who 



A NEW HEAET. 33 

spoke burning words of prophecy ; grant, that, with a 
peculiar light, it beamed forth from the face of the 
Apostles ; still, at the same time, has God breathed no 
inspiration at all into other men ? Grant, that the old 
heathen sages were not in the advanced light of divine 
revelation; were they so utterly excluded from God 
that their words of wisdom and of love were but 
mere words of man's wisdom? "Was that the meas- 
ure of moral stature to which they attained — utterly 
excluded from God? Is any achievement of man — - 
of the cunning pencil, the strong hammer — the work 
of the eye or the arm — of the eager muscles, or the 
bounding brain — entirely without God's help and 
agency ? 

The fact is just this : God stands ready with His con- 
ditions which are necessary to all human effort and to 
all success, whenever man is ready to fall in with those 
conditions. "When we set the sail, the wind will blow ; 
when we sow the seed, the agencies that God himself 
has prepared in the atmosphere and in the earth will 
perform their part; and when we set ourselves to 
work to make a new heart, God's spirit will breathe 
upon us and help us to consummate the work. That is 
the answer to all quibbles about prayer — how God Al- 
mighty can answer prayer and yet keep the laws of the 
physical universe stable. Why, the laws of the phys- 
ical universe do not transcend all laws. There is a 
realm of spirit above the mere physical where man 
comes in contact with God, and God comes in contact 

2* 



34 EXTEMPOKANEOUS DI8COUESES. 

with man ; and if we fall in with those spiritual laws, 
if we respond to those superior conditions, then there 
is no physical law intercepted or violated because God 
answers our prayer. How do you know that a phys- 
ical law is violated, if when a man prays for inward 
strength to overcome temptation, God breathes it into 
him? "Where is the violation of a physical law? How 
much do you know of disease ; how much do our physi- 
cians know of disease ? "We can see that they do not 
deny that God Almighty can touch the secret springs 
of his agencies, so that when we pray that a friend 
may get well, that friend may be healed. Fall in with 
the conditions of prayer, just as you fall in with the 
conditions of the growth of harvest during seed-time. 
God stands ready with his subtile agencies of light, 
air, and soil; sow your seed, and harvest will come. 
So God stands with his agencies of inspiration and de- 
liverance; breathe your prayer and you have touched 
the spring of established agencies by which it shall be 
answered. Seek to get a new heart with all your 
might, just as you seek an education. God stands 
ready to do his work with his agencies, and the glory 
redounds to him. Just put yourself in the attitude to 
receive them ; go to work to make a new heart, just as 
if you were an ambitious man and were going to make 
an effort for human power ; or as if you had lost a for- 
tune and were going to work to make a new one ; or 
as if you had your reputation tainted, and you were 
going to try to retrieve it. 



A NEW HEART. 35 

Yes, go to work to make a new heart; act. earnestly 
about it and God will do his part. You will not take 
glory to yourself. ISTo man that knows what it is to 
strive to overcome evil affections within, and sore 
temptations without, to grow better and purer, will take 
anything to himself in working out that deliverance. 
If in any degree he shall attain that end, he will feel 
that he has had Divine help — that something higher 
than he has breathed into him and inspired him. The 
very process of his work will show where he touches 
God, and where God Almighty has helped him, and he 
will give all the glory to him. So it is perfectly con- 
sistent with God's power and glory to speak to us in 
the words of the text, "Make you a new heart and a 
new spirit." 

It is a call to action. "What are you waiting for? 
Actually, people are waiting, in the matter of the relig- 
ious life, for some strange event to take place — either 
some outward concurrence of God's providence, or else 
some inward motion of his mysterious help which they 
can palpably feel, before they can turn in and answer 
the prophet's appeal made in the text. Waiting for 
what? To have a right heart and a right spirit. Some 
are waiting for a great shock or convulsion which shall 
run over the community, termed a religious revival ; or, 
as I have before remarked, for some strange act of Prov- 
idence. My friend, you will be in no better condition 
a year hence, if you live, than you are now. You will 
never be in a better condition than now to make your- 



38 EXTEMPOK ANEOUS DISCOTJESEiJ. 

self a new heart. The call is at once ; it is now. The 
Divine agencies are ready; it is only for you to surren- 
der yourself to the conception of the great purpose 
and the great aim, and God will answer, and the bless- 
ing will come flowing within. It is a question of 
agency, and we need have no fear of attributing too 
much to human efforts. 

In the next place, let us consider the peculiarity 
which this power and privilege of making a new heart 
exhibits in man. It is a wonderful thing that a man 
can make himself a new heart. How all little, shallow 
skepticisms go down before one grand moral fact ! 
Superficial science affects to see in man nothing but a 
superior animal — a highly developed ape; and judged 
solely by its standard, man is but little superior, and in 
some respects appears inferior, to the higher order of 
brutes. But when we seek to find the true standard 
of excellence, how distinct he stands from all the crea- 
tures around him! The moment we make that explo- 
ration, we discover that there is a progressive power in 
him, by which he advances from limit to limit, from 
point to point, and by which even the lowest soul ex- 
hibits a capacity of boundlessness and a power of chang- 
ing the life, while the most solid materials of this round 
globe become before the inspiration of his spirit and 
skill of his intellect, as clay to the potter. All sealed 
things he unloosens ; all secrets he lays open ; and as 
he marches on from point to point of civilization, of 
glory, of intellectual attainment, of scientific achieve- 



A NEW HEAET. 37 

ment, by the inward power within him, the outward 
world is changed and assumes aspects that reflect his 
genius and thought. 

But there is more than this in man. There is the 
power of going into himself, and quarrying in the deep 
places of his own soul. There is a power of changing 
the tendency and plane of his own life. You never 
heard of that in the brutes. They all run in the 
same round, move forward in the same direction, re- 
volve in the same orbit from age to age. But man has 
the power of stopping short, changing his direction, 
lifting up the level of his life, and becoming a new be- 
ing. So it is the inward change that makes him the 
new being. "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or 
the leopard his spots?" No; but man is capable of a 
moral change that makes him actually a new creature. 
For what constitutes the new man ? Not change of 
bodily vesture, not change of outward circumstances. 
The man has not necessarily a new life when he is 
transported to some other scene of action ; and in local- 
izing heaven, in making it a material scene, it is a great 
mistake to suppose that all that is to constitute the 
future life of man is a change of place and condition. 
Oh, no ; the new life consists in having a new heart 
and new spirit, w T herever man is placed. Paul in the 
dungeon at Philippi sings in the very orchestra of 
heaven, and makes it ring with his psalms. And 
John on the isle of Patmos sees the walls of the new 
Jerusalem, with their golden doors and crystal fonnda- 



38 EXTEMPOKANEOUS DISCOUKSES. 

tions. It is not where a man is, but what he is, that 
makes the new life, the new man, the new condition. 
It is the new spirit that comes into a man that pro- 
duces the great and vital change. This is the new 
birth of which Christ spoke to Nicodemus. Man 
should be born again ; he should enter into a new 
spiritual life, with new affections, new aims, new 
points of view, new tendencies. If you could give a 
man a new physical creation, if you could take lit- 
erally the old fleshy heart out of him and put in a new 
fleshy heart, that would not give him a new spirit and 
make a wise man of him, and that is the reason why 
these two things are conjoined in the text. They are 
one thing. " Make you a new heart and a new spirit,' 9 
and then you have the new man — then you have new 
life. 

Oh, how wonderfully religion adjusts itself to the great 
facts and needs of human nature ! for is there anything 
that could be stated of such immediate and vital im- 
portance as this simple appeal, " Make yourself a new 
heart?" Religion does not circle around a man in 
metaphysical speculation. It does not go back to his- 
torical and ethnological questions. It comes and sets 
itself right down before the citadel of a man's sin and 
a man's want ; it strikes right at the vital point ; it 
says, Make yourself a new heart ; cast away your 
transgressions ; rise with a new spirit and a new aim ; 
seek the great ends for which God has made you to 
live ; seek the ideal which Christ sets up before you. 



A NEW HEART . 39 

Is it not a great thing that a man has this power — I 
ask once more — this possibility, that he can go to the 
most abandoned creature that God has made in the 
shape of humanity, and have the strong assurance to 
say to him, "Oh, castaway — oh, ingrate — oh, alien 
from your Father and from Christ your Saviour, stir, 
oh, stir under those cerements of abomination ; quicken 
to new life under all the darkness and dreadfulness of 
sin : make vourself a new heart and become a new 
man?" Man is immensely separated from all creatures 
round and about him in this capacity and this priv- 
ilege. 

Out of this change come all other changes, "No 
movement for the regeneration of society, no measure for 
the improvement of the world, can be radically effect- 
ive only as it comes out of the reservoirs of individual 
hearts. It is a good world or a bad world, as men's 
hearts are good or bad. Man himself is the world, and 
as he is, so things will be. How vital, how radical, 
then, is the appeal made in the text ! In all condi- 
tions of life, in all trials, in all misfortunes, this is what 
we want — a new heart — and then the aspect of things 
will be changed. Because we can not always change 
things themselves. The man that is borne down by 
calamity can not alter his calamity. There it stands 
before him — the misfortune that perhaps has blasted 
well-founded hopes, deprived him of his property or his 
station in society. But make yourself a new heart ; fall 
into harmony with God's law in the matter ; see your 



40 EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCO UK 8 ES . 

misfortune in a providential point of view, far np in the 
light of some higher and grander purpose which God 
has in store for you, and look if the thing will be 
changed. It will stand there as a calamity if you look 
at it in your old way ; but if you look at it in the light 
of God's providence, it will be a new thing to you. 

Oh, mourning friend, weeping companion, bowed 
down and desolate soul, death is a terrible fact, and it 
can not be altered. The green grave is there to be 
covered by the winter snow; the vacant house, the 
empty chair, the garments never to be worn again, the 
echoes never more to be awakened, the voice of music 
never again to peal in your ear, are all sad mementoes ; 
but make yourself a new heart, come into accordance 
with the infinite design and purpose, and even in this 
heavy affliction will your soul become attuned and 
accorded to that perfect trust in God which Christ had 
when he took the cup and drank it, and the aspect of 
calamity will be changed to you. It is the new heart 
you want. That is the great distinction in men — the 
heart ; not simply conventional motives. If a man has 
what is called a good heart, then we can trust him. 
However in fault for the moment he may seem, however 
wrong may be his course (not that he is to make the 
possession of a good heart an excuse for his errors ; that 
is not an excuse ; you are not good-hearted the moment 
you offer that excuse for your sin), we who have no 
right to judge harshly our fellow-man, we who car not 
pass sentence upon his short-comings, can make large 



A NEW HEAPwT. 



41 



allowance from the fact that under his temporary aber- 
rations the man has a good heart. The most hopeless 
case is, where a man's heart is all corrupted. Beauty 
grows as ghastly as a skeleton the moment we find 
that under the rosy cheeks and bright eyes there is a 
false, hollow heart. Talent becomes but as a mere 
torch-light that is carried among tombs — like those 
burning exhalations we see in swamps — the moment 
we find that under the brilliant intellect there is a 
false, rotten, corrupted heart. Thus it is in the mo- 
tives of the heart that we are to distinguish and esti- 
mate men. 

But there is another respect in which men differ, 
and that is in strength and capacity of heart ; so that 
some men are distinguished by the fact that in all 
calamities, in all trials they gather out of their hearts 
the resources of a new and better life. It is just like 
a perpetual spring within them. If one form of con- 
templated good perishes, if one hope drops away, if 
one resource fails, down they go, down into their 
hearts again, and call up something else. A great 
strong heart is never overcome. It finds its own re- 
sources and falls back into its own possibilities. It is 
sad to find a man who says, "I have no heart;" to see 
a forlorn creature who says, "I have no power to 
struggle any more ;" but as long as there is no blight 
or taint, the power, the possibility of the man is left. 
There was our gifted historian, who died so suddenly 
the other day. See how that physical calamity which 



42 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

occurred to him in his early years would have affected 
some men. They would have crouched literally by the 
way-side of life, and even if they had had that man's 
powers they would have made their calamity an excuse 
for a life of idleness and waste. How was it with him ? 
He fell back into his own great and noble heart and out 
of it he brought up new life which became to him a 
strength and power that perhaps he never would have 
exhibited had not that misfortune happened to him. 
But for that he might have been a scholar ; or much 
worse, a politician ; but the twilight of almost total 
blindness having fallen on him, he called up those 
powers and concentrated them upon the great work 
of history, and when building up this historical struc- 
ture, just as an architect builds up a great cathe- 
dral, like that at Cologne, standing forth majestic 
and glorious, he profited by the very calamity that 
excluded him from other pursuits and aims. Tea, and 
with a still nobler spirit, when others lamented his 
calamity and sought to condole with him in his mis- 
fortune, he sang songs in the night and spoke noble 
words of cheer and encouragement. Now I say it was 
not out of the intellect, but out of a noble and faithful 
heart streamed forth that beautiful life which made 
this man one of the stars in the constellation of our 
literature. 

" Make you a new heart." How vital this is ! It 
goes below all things else. It goes to the center of a 
man's personality, and out of it springs all real life. 



A NEW HEAET. 43 

Not make yourself new brains. We do not want them 
so much, as hearts. Not new conditions. We see men 
well endowed with conditions, but not with the will to 
use them. We want new hearts ; not new intellectual 
powers. We can not make new brains, but we can, 
every one of us, make a new heart. The great con- 
sideration is, Do we desire a new heart ? What is the 
life within ? Are we selfish ? Are we gravitating 
simply to this world, living within our aims, vain cares, 
and uses ? Across the sweep of ages come the prophet's 
words, " Make you a new heart and a new spirit." 
There is nothing vague or mysterious about it. Change 
your affections if they are selfish ; change your aim if 
it is low ; lift up your eyes to that mark of the high 
calling to which Christ draws you, and let the spirit 
that was in him be in you. That is making a new 
heart. Take your heart with earnest purpose and fer- 
vent prayer to the cross of Christ, hold it up as a 
chalice, and let him fill it with his divine excellence 
and divine self-sacrifice, and then, in the possession of 
his quickening spirit, you will have a new heart. 



LOYE OF THE 



WORLD. 



Love not the "world, neither the things that are in the -world, If 
any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. — 1 
John ii 15 

I SUPPOSE there are a great many who would ren- 
der consent to the injunction and doctrine of this 
text literally interpreted — render consent with their 
lips, but withhold it in their hearts. " Love not the 
world, neither the things that are in the world." To 
them this is the very essence of religion, and of course 
they feel that they must confess it with their lips, and 
they do. Surely they must show outward respect for re- 
ligion, and if religion says, "Love not the world, neither 
the things that are in the world," they must say so, too. 
And yet, I repeat, their hearts do not make this confes- 
sion ; but while they reiterate it with their lips, they do 
love the world and the things of the world, and can 
not help loving them. 

This only shows what an unreal thing with many 
people religion is — so unreal that they are ready to con- 
fess to any statement of its doctrines, and then practice 
right the contrary in their lives. And this is the way 
in which religion is regarded among men very generally 



4(3 EXTEMPOEAXEOUS DISCOUESES. 

— at least too commonly — as a matter of limitation — • 
something that we are not to do. Men look upon it as 
a prohibitory law more than anything else. It comes to 
them in its form of* law, as an external sanction, a lim- 
itation to the natural instincts of humanity, often hedg- 
ing in our natural affections and commanding us not to 
do this or that ; and just in proportion as a thing is beau- 
tiful and dear, just in proportion as it seems good to 
us, a great many think the merit of a religious life is in 
turning away from it ; just in proportion as they yearn 
for it they feel that they must cast it off. This is the 
reason why many hold religion in such a Jesuitical way. 
They confess to the full tenor of the letter ; they come 
smooth up to the requirement of the precept, and then 
seeing that both letter and precept are impossible to be 
fulfilled according to their interpretation of them, they 
resort to subtile evasions — to explanations in their lives 
which they do not make with their lips — and thus 
exhibit great inconsistency. And hence we find many 
religious people are such unlovely people. So far as 
they entertain any notion of religion- at all, it is made 
up of this principle of prohibition, restraint, and asceti- 
cism. They do not come to us as Christ came, present- 
ing something that we really love, something that at- 
tracts the mind, something that moves the affections of 
the soul, but they come to us, so far as then* religious 
character is concerned, bristling all over with these pro- 
hibitions and restraints. This is why religion is held so 
inconsistently, as I have said; the life not accordant 



LOVE OF THE WOULD. 4f 

with the professions of the lip ; the daily walk, the or- 
dinary round of performance not answering to that 
which is held and insisted upon as a dogma. 

This is why men who profess religion are very often 
so worldly. They have two compartments to their 
being — a religious compartment, separate from every- 
thing else, into which they enter once in awhile and 
manifest to the world what they consider godliness; 
and a worldly compartment, in which they cut loose 
entirely from their religion, and live according to the 
ordinary standard of men. In fact, they live below 
that standard; for you will often find men who are 
very strict in religious observances and professions, 
who, in regard to every-day duties, fall far below -the 
men of the world. 

ISTow nothing is to be lamented more than this 
unreality of religion. I wish people would just look 
at this for awhile. Here is religion in the world — 
here is its system of truths — here are its require- 
ments, its teachings concerning God, duty, and destiny 
— here are its great sanctions, bearing upon inward 
life, upon spiritual realities, upon the highest interests 
of the soul. I would that men would ask themselves 
whether this is real or not. It can not be denied 
that though professing to teach these profoundest 
of truths, though bearing upon these greatest of all 
interests, religion is, with some men, the most unreal 
of all things in the world. It is not real as their home? 
are real, as their daily rounds of social intercourse 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

are real, as their business is real. If men would but 
sit down for one hour and address themselves to the 
great question — Is there a reality in religion ? has it 
this claim upon my life and soul ? — if they would look 
at it in this view instead of merely rendering an out- 
ward respect for it as matter of course, or taking it as 
a traditional creed, making it consist in going to church 
and listening to preaching, I think there would come 
a change over the hearts of men, over the surface of 
society, over all the relations, objects, and duties of 
life. 

ITow why is it that religion is so presented ? It is 
because such statements as that made in the text re- 
ceive an inconsiderate interpretation. " Love not the 
world, neither the things that are in the world." Men 
know that taking that literally, it is impossible to obey 
it, and at the same time they profess to consider it as a 
positive injunction of religion, and so interpret it. It 
is unreal to them because it is impossible in practice, 
and religion itself is involved in that unreality. 

But on the other hand, a man who thinks about re- 
ligion, to whom of all things it has the greatest reality, 
who has made up his mind that to whatever it requires 
he will surrender his entire heart and soul and have no 
double dealing, no compromise, that man first of all 
would set himself to thinking what the text really 
means. He would not take it with a prompt assent as 
a complimentary confession on his part without regard 
to the signification of the passage. Convinced Ohai 



LO YE OF THE WORLD. 49 

there can be no antagonism between the great primal 
instincts of -the heart and the great requirements of re- 
ligion, he would ask whether this really means that we 
are to love nothing in the world — neither fair sight 
nor pleasant sound, neither dear child nor devoted 
friend. In one word, is religion asceticism ? Are the 
natural affections, using that term in its popular sense, 
wrong ? Because when you come to the passage where 
the Apostle speaks of the natural man and natural 
affections, you must remember that he is speaking of 
the sensual man as distinguished from the spiritual 
man — not of man as God has made him, in the primal 
condition of his nature, but simply in the lower part 
of his nature. And when he says the natural man can 
not understand the things of God, he means the sensual 
man — the man who lives from the senses and looks at 
things in a sensual point of view. Such a man can 
not understand the things of God. It is not true that 
in the natural man, as he comes from the hands of 
his Maker, there is no right affection, no good thing ; 
but in the sensual man there is no spiritual thing, no 
ground of religion. You must go higher, with the 
spiritual man, and take the phrase "natural affection" 
as meaning those deep instincts, those primal sympa- 
thies which God himself has implanted in our nature. 

Is it true, then, that religion requires lis to sacrifice 
every natural affection ? If it is, then comply with it. 
If religion is this everlasting form of truth, and relates 
to our eternal interests — if true religion is the will of 

3 



50 EXTEMPORANEOUS DIS COUE3ES. 

God, and is that method by wMch we come into ac- 
cordance with God — and if it calls upon us to sacrifice 
every natural affection, and turn away from every 
beautiful thing, then comply with it. Hone of this 
profession of religion without confession of it. Away 
with anything like playing religion ; away with any- 
thing like simulated faith and righteousness ; forsake 
the mere ordinary pursuits of life, and cling to the 
altar-cloth, the prayer-book, Sunday severity, and ama- 
teur mortification ; put on sackcloth and run to the 
cloister. If religion is such a thins;, then Simeon 
Stylites, on his pillar-top, was a pattern saint. 

But if this is not the ideal of religion, let us find 
out what the true ideal is. If there is a love of natural 
things perfectly consistent with, and flowing out from 
the love of God — if a man may be religious, and yet 
comprehensive in his love, fond of nature, fond of art, 
attracted to the really beautiful and excellent, kind 
and loving among his fellow-men, endowed with 
friendly affections and world-wide sympathies, over- 
flowing with generous impulses and instincts — if a man 
may be devout, and yet have all these, let us know it, 
and if we know it, let us act accordingly. But let our 
type of religion be one thing or the other — not an in- 
effectual effort to join the two — riot an attempt to be 
ascetic and yet cheerful, to quit the world and yet be 
in it, to deny every beautiful "affection, and yet yield 
to the influence of that affection. And certainly, as to 
worldly good, a great many hold on to it so tightly, 



LO YE OF THE W 0 ELD. 5j 

that they go into their graves clinging to their money- 
bags, when they think they have fast hold on the 
Bible. Let us have no sham religion, no unsubstantial 
religion, but let it be a reality. I would to God that 
this subject would take possession of men's minds; 
that every interest would be suspended to examine the 
ground of true religion, divest it of all falsehood, and 
discover its reality ; and then that men would take it 
into their hearts, and illustrate it in their lives. So 
long as it is made to consist in the mere affirmation of 
the lips, with no application to the heart and life, so 
long shall we see that unreality and deadness which 
prevail in the world. 

Now what is the doctrine in the text? When we 
consider it in its connection and bearing, we find it is 
not a mere statement of negations. " Love not the 
world, neither the things that are in the world." It 
does not stop with this. Why not love these? Be- 
cause we are called to cherish a higher and more com- 
prehensive affection ; we are to love, not the world, nor 
the things of the world supremely, because if we do, we 
can not love the Father supremely. That is the positive 
state of the case. We are to love the Father supremely. 
We can not love any two things supremely. We can 
not love nature, or our business, our children, our 
wives, our houses, our lands, or our lives supremely, 
and at the same time love God supremely. That is 
the point. It sets before us a supreme object of our 
love. It is a question of standards. What shall that 



52 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 



supreme object be? It sets before us God as that 
object. It brings Him to us in all the forms of His love- 
liness, in all His claims upon our affection. It sets him 
up before us, and requires us to love him supremely ; 
and if we love him supremely, we can not love the 
world, nor the things of the world, supremely. AVe 
can not make them the standard of our love and ac- 
tion, and yet make him the standard of our love and 
action. All things that God loves, and in which he 
shows forth his love — all things consistent and compat- 
ible with the love of God our Father, we may love; 
but we love them as the result of loving the Father. 
For instance : we may of course love all things that 
are essentially right, because they are of the Father, 
and in loving them we love the Father ; but we can 
love nothing that is essentially wrong. 

There are some who try to preserve a sort of bal- 
ance between the two — between the spirit that makes 
this world supreme, which of course dissolves all 
moral distinction between right and wrong; and the 
spirit that makes God supreme, which claims as right 
the love of right only. There are some who wish to 
keep in with both these elements. They want the 
the world and they want heaven. They try to live on 
both sides of the fence, and they hope to postpone the 
inevitable collision between the two forces. It is like 
compromising with a cancer, or holding negotiations 
with the yellow fever. There are only two standards — 
that which proceeds from the love of God as supreme ; 



LO YE OF THE WORLD. 53 

that which proceeds from the love of the world as su- 
preme. You can not serve them both. You can not 
cheat six days in the week, and get into heaven with a 
good long leap on Sunday. You can not connect those 
things which flow from the love of the world as 
supreme, with those which flow from the love of God 
as supreme. 

The truth is, the whole statement of the text rests 
upon the trite and simple fact, that every man has a 
master-motive in his heart, which he more or less con- 
sciously acts upon. If you look upon men superficially, 
there are some whose lives you may think are chaotic 
and incongruous, from the fact that they seem to have 
no end or aim, their life spent floating this way and 
that without any apparent purpose. You may think 
they have no master-motive in their lives — no con- 
trolling principle which shapes their ends — but they 
have. Such men are influenced by the love of ease — 
of their own personal gratification — and they go wher- 
ever they think they can find it. They flit from object 
to object, as butterflies flit from flower to flower, sip- 
ping, by turns, of this and of that; but as the butter- 
fly, inconstant as it seems, has its motive, so the ap- 
parently aimless man of pleasure has his master-mo- 
tive, which consists in the love of ease. And so all 
men, when you come to examine them, have some great 
master-principle, around which all their actions gravi- 
tate, out of which all their conduct proceeds, and which, 



54; EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCO UESE3. 

could yon get at it, would explain the whole of their 
interior life and moral history. 

I repeat ; when you look at the matter closely, there 
are two divisions amono 1 men — those who are guided 
by the love of God the Father as supreme, and those 
who love the world supremely. 

There is one general ground from which a man 
measures. Here, for instance, is a man that measures 
from the love of the world, from the summit of world- 
ly advantage. If you want to explain his life, you do 
it in this way: he starts with worldly sanctions and 
worldly interests, and thus sometimes measures up to 
spiritual claims and moral laws. So you see men in 
every avocation of life, from the most private to the 
most public transactions, willing enough to confess the 
right, but after all holding it subordinate to the ground 
from which they measure — worldly advantage. Thus 
when Christ comes to establish his heavenly kingdom 
in the world, marching for eighteen hundred years, 
sadly and slowly as when he carried his own cross; 
when he comes bringing his demands for justice, his 
clear shining requirements of love to God and to hu- 
manity, knocking at the doors of trade and of society, 
of churches and of senates, you find these men take up 
the exclamation: ; * This will never do ; we are not pre- 
pared for it ; it is all right, but it is an abstraction : we 
must take hold of those things which we know to be 
expedient, even though they may not be quite right." 

Men think there is an advantage in this worldly pol- 



LO YE OF THE WORLD. 55 

icy. Men think they have found a great argument 
against the abolition of slavery because it doesn't work 
well in all things; and they refer to Jamaica. Suppose 
there had never been another grain of sugar made; 
suppose the island had sunk into the ocean, and every 
material interest had been swept away; the question 
is, was the act of emancipation right? That is the 
standard by which to measure the everlasting advan- 
tage of everything in this world. Eight thunders at 
the doors of the Senate, but expediency answers, and 
pleads its end. Eight moves man to do well in his 
trade, but interest tells him he can do better. He says, 
" I know I ought to do the right thins:, but I must look 
out for my living in this world. I am placed in the 
midst of competitors. My neighbors on my right and 
on my left are underselling me, and if I do not make 
certain maxims of trade superior to Christian maxims, 
it will go down. These are men who measure from the 
ground of worldly sanction up to the supreme standard; 
if they can get hold of that and live by it they will be 
very glad; but if one of the two must come down, it 
must be God Almighty's law, and their worldly, tem- 
poral advantage must survive. 

So with some men there is a distinction between the 
rule which should govern public, and that which 
should govern private action. They will do things in 
public, as a community, as a party, as a nation, that 
they would not do as individuals, nor think of doing. 
jSTo man would think of stealing an apple from a boy 



5g EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUKSES. 

because he wants it, but men would steal a whole 
island because they want it, with a meanness just in 
proportion to the largeness of the theft. Why is this ? 
Because men talk of an expediency in regard to public 
acts, concerning which they would not venture a lisp 
in regard to private ones, and make that the rule, 
rather than the supreme, eternal right. 

Now a thing is either right or it is wrong. If we 
measure from God's supreme law, the love of the 
Father, we must bring everything else down before 
that ; if we measure from worldly advantage, we must 
bring God's law down before that. Let us not make 
confusion here. I do not think that a man can imme- 
diately gain the whole right — can immediately spring 
from the position in which he stands, and do every- 
thing he would do. He is to do all he can do, but not 
for a moment do that which is wrong. There is a 
great difference between doing that which is right, 
though it is only partially done, and doing that which 
is positively wrong. There is never a moment in pub- 
lic or private action when we have a right to do a 
positive wrong; but there may be a time when we 
should all do the right we can, press toward it as fast 
as we can, take hold of the practical good, and strive 
for more. This holding half-way, while trying to go 
the whole way with the right, is very different from 
going on walking with the wrong because it is expedient. 

Love not the world is the principle. In measuring 
the decalogue, ^ye must take Christ's golden rule, 



LOVE OF THE "WORLD. 

rather than the golden eagle. What the Apostle means 
by loving the world, and the things of the world, is, 
loving them supremely and making them a standard ; 
measuring from the ground of worldly sanction and 
interest, up to the supreme right. 

Sometimes men's compliance with the injunction in 
the text amounts simply to a negative — to not loving. 
A great many succeed in that — in not loving ; that is 
about the essence of their lives and their religion. 
They do not love this, and they do not love that. They 
do not love this amusement ; they do not love 
this kind of people; they do not love that class of 
Christians. The whole of their faith and righteous- 
ness is a sour asceticism. Their piety is ghastly ; their 
philanthropy is mechanical ; their love of souls is an 
effort, and not spontaneous — a galvanic twitch of the 
muscles, rather than the inspiration of the heart. 
"When I contrast the loving Jesus, comprehending all 
things in his ample and tender charity, with those who 
profess to bear his name, marking their zeal by what 
they do not love, it seems to me as though men, like 
the witches of old, had read the Bible backward, and 
had taken incantations out of it for evil, rather than in- 
spiration for good. Not loving — that is not the meas- 
ure of the text. This self-conceited standard pf our own 
righteousness — this sour, hateful, narrow ascetioism, is 
just as much of the world as anything else. It is of 
the world, and does not answer to the requisition which 
is really set forth in the text. 

3* 



58 EXTEMPOBANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

No, my friends, we are to measure from the love of 
the Father downward — not from. the love of worldly 
advantage and sanction upward. That is the real 
meaning of the text. Loving the Father supremely, 
we shall know what to love as he loves, and we shall 
see everything in the relation in which he sees it. 
From his all-comprehending affection we shall go forth 
to see everything truly, and to love everything as we 
ought to love it. Then we shall love the world of na- 
ture, because God Almighty made it; because it was 
pronounced by him very good ; because it is a mani- 
festation of his wisdom, of his power, of his constant 
beneficence. Our loving not the world will be not to 
love the evil, but to love the good — to be filled to 
overflowing with the Divine spirit. We shall then 
behold all nature as an outward expression of God's 
love — a continual offering to his name — the drapery of 
his manifestation— a temple filled with his own pres- 
ence. "We shall love the world of humanity ; we 
shall love all good and right things, because we shall 
start from the love that is in him. 

"What do the Scriptures say of God's love? He so 
loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son 
for it. Christ so loved man that he came to die for 
him. Surely there is no antagonism here — no collision 
of truths. When the Apostle says, "Love not the 
world, neither the things that are in the world," he 
certainly means that we shall understand him in ac- 
cordance with the fact that God loved the world, and 



L 0 YE OF THE ¥OELD. 59 

so loved it that He sent His Son to die for it ; that 
Christ did so love mankind that he poured out his pre- 
cious blood and sacrificed his life for them. Does not 
this show you at once, that in order to properly under- 
stand the text we should start right? Start with the 
love of the Father, and you will love all things in their 
order, in their degree, in their proper relations. Start 
with the love of the world, and you will love things un- 
wisely and falsely. You will hold the expedient superior 
to the right. You will often take the wrong when you 
should take the right. You will often love the evil 
when you should love the good. Start with the love 
of the Father, love Him supremely, and the world, and 
the things that are in the world, will fall into their 
proper place. Every daily duty,- every daily care, 
every common interest — your homes, your toils, your 
trials, will all be loved by you in due proportion, be- 
cause you will read in them the Father's meaning, and 
you will see them in their true relations and signifi- 
cance. 

And still again : when we start from this ground of 
love we learn to distinguish the essence of things from 
the outside of things. "We love the world and the 
things in the world in contrast to the love of the Father, 
when we love that which is external merely. When, 
for instance, a man becomes so enamored of nature 
that he forgets the God who made it; when all science 
is merely an accumulation of dead facts ; when he 
looks upon nature in such a way that he feels that the 



gO EXTEM POEANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

stone made God rather than God the stone ; when all 
creation becomes to liim nothing hut mineral, vegetable, 
and animal matter; when death becomes an eternal 
sleep ; when he sees not the foot-prints of the Al- 
mighty in the way-niarks of Geology ; when he 
touches not the pulses of the infinite in the motions of 
the worlds, but all is a dead blank and all traces of 
God have vanished, then man has that love of the 
world, and of the things that are in it, which is con- 
demned by the Apostle. 

So, too, a man may love humanity simply on its 
out-side — for its advantage to him — merely for that 
which is pleasing to him, not in its essence. Jesus 
Christ did not look at the outside of men. He did not 
love humanity as high or low, rich or poor. He did 
not love it as turning toward him an aspect of kind- 
ness and friendliness, but as turning to him often an 
aspect of enmity and scorn. Men are ready enough 
in their protestations concerning humanity, ready 
enough to say how much they love the world at large, 
and yet they do not love a single individual enough 
to do as Christ did — to lay clown their life for that 
individual. There is the test which he made of his 
supreme love — that he so loved his friends, nay. so 
loved his enemies, that -he laid down his life for them. 
We admire the old classic story of Damon and Pythias, 
and consider it wonderful that a man was ready to 
lay down his life for another. We extol the patriot's 
love, and regard it as a noble thing he should pour out 



LOVE OF THE WORLD. 

his blood for the good of his country. We revere 
the martyr, and esteem it a glorious act that he will 
stand up amid the red flame and endure the terrible 
torture for the cause of truth. But, my friends, that 
is as far, I suppose, as humanity has ever gone, unless 
it is from the peculiar inspiration of Jesus Christ. He 
went further than this. He not only died for his 
friends, but he laid down his life for his enemies. He 
laid down his life for the very men that were piercing 
and crucifying him. He laid it clown for denying 
Peter, for traitorous Judas, for men in all ages who 
have denied his name or rejected his love. There is 
the glory of Jesus Christ. He looked into humanity 
as a divine essence — an emanation from God. He saw 
it in its priceless worth and died for it — not for its re- 
lations to him of friendliness, or kindness, or love, or 
service, or beauty, or use, but for its intrinsic worth 
and preciousness. 

That is the way to love humanity. Not because 
it serves us, not because it is pleasant to us, not 
because it is friendly to us. That is a very little 
thing. How sour men get by-and-by who love it on 
that account ! The generous youth, who was ready to 
go to distant lands to serve humanity, by-and-by be- 
comes a bitter misanthrope. He has no faith in the 
world, no trust in men. His nature becomes covered 
with a thick film of contempt and despair. Why? 
Simply because men have not turned out quite as good 
as he thought they would. Because they have often 



Q2 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

turned toward him faces of coldness and scorn. Be- 
cause lie lias often found friendship to "be hollow, and 
protestations to amount to nothing. Because he has 
found men who opposed his interests. For these rea- 
sons he has turned away in disgust from his former 
position, from his generous philanthropy, from his con- 
fiding love, and has become a sour, carping skeptic and 
critic of humanity. 

Xot so with the true Christian — not so with the man 
that has the heart of Jesus Christ in him. He never 
falters in his high faith in, and deep love for, human- 
ity, because he sees it and loves it as Jesus Christ did 
— not with reference to himself, but for its intrinsic 
character and value in the eyes of God. 

So you see, when the Apostle says, i; Love not the 
world, neither the things of the world,'' he means that 
we are not to love the outside of the world — the world 
in its external aspects — the sensuous and material 
forms of things. It is so in everything. It is so in 
regard to our occupations and our interests. What are 
we laboring for ? The mere means of living? Health, 
pleasure, sensuous things; for themselves alone? Then 
comes the command to us, "Love not the world, neither 
the things that are in the world.*' But if in our labor 
we recognize the great ends of this earthly discipline; 
if in our wealth we see its proper uses : if in our daily 
cares we behold their influence upon our better life, 
and try to jay hold of that, that is loving things in 
their essence rather than the outside. 



L 0 YE OF THE WOELD. gg 

Oh, my friends, it is a great thing for a man to know 
in what way he loves the world. That is the measure of 
all human character. Tossed on life's ocean, men may 
have to-day none of the usual means of observation — 
none of the usual tests by which they may know 
where they are drifting ; they may be surrounded by a 
dense, dark fog. "What must they do ? They must 
resort to soundings — drop the line far down in the 
depths below, and judge from the soil that the lead 
brings up where they are. It is so in life. A man 
may be bewildered by false estimates of himself. He 
may not know where he is drifting or bound. It is a 
great thing for him, in such a situation, to sound his 
own heart, to drop the line of examination down deep 
within, and see what is there. And I repeat : the 
great test by which he may know where he stands in 
God's universe, is to know what he loves, and why he 
loves it. 

Oh, look into your own heart. What is it you love 
most in this world ? Not what you profess, not what 
you may seem to the world, but what is your great 
love ? Do you love the outside of things — their sensu- 
ous aspect — wealth, fame, pleasure — the shell of this 
world that is fading away — the outsides of men, be- 
cause they serve you? Or do you look upon things 
in the very vision of God, and love them for their 
essence ? In order to love truly, we must first love the 
Father — get into accordance with his comprehensive 
affection — have his vision— see, in some, sense, as he 



gj. EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

sees — feel, in some degree, as lie feels. Then we 
shall know how to love all things rightly. Drawn 
unto him by that love which he has shown for us — 
drawn to him by that manifested goodness in which he 
ajDpears to us in every form of daily benefit, and espe- 
cially in the character and life of Jesus Christ ; drawn 
to him and loving him, we shall know how truly to 
love all things ; and more than that, we may in some 
little degree learn to love him even as he has loved us. 

It depends, then, upon where you start — the point 
of view from which you look — how you read this text. 
If you start from the love of the world, it will be to 
you a stumbling-block in the way of real religion ; 
if you start from the love of the Father, it will be to 
you a help, showing you how to love all things truly, 
in the spirit of God, and with the great love that was 
in Jesus Christ. 



LONGING- FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS. , 



Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness ; 
for thej shall "be filled. — Matt. v. 6. 

I CALL your attention this morning to one of the 
beatitudes as set forth in the text. In the present 
discourse we will consider two points — first, the con- 
dition of the beatitude ; and, second, its nature or re- 
sult. 

In the first place, then, consider the strong expres- 
sions used in the text. They convey an idea of the 
most intense desire and longing. The spiritual condi- 
tion is represented by the most potent of the animal 
appetites — hunger and thirst — appetites that can not be 
subdued — that never can be completely overcome. A 
man may conquer or control all other inclinations; he 
may succeed in almost extirpating them from his na- 
ture; but these will assert their claims, and must be 
satisfied. No ascetic privation, no strenuous effort of 
the will, can lift a man into absolute superiority to 
the demands of hunger and thirst. 

" Hunger," says a recent writer, "is one of the be- 
neficent and terrible instincts — the fire of life, under- 
lying all impulses to labor, and moving men to noble 



QQ EXTEMPOE ANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

activities by its imperious demands. On the other hand, 
it subjects the humanity in man, and makes the brute 
predominate; it impels the most beneficent activities; 
it works the most terrible ferocities. Equally potent, 
and perhaps still more stringent in its impulses, is the 
sense of thirst." 

You see, then, my friends, with what profound dis- 
crimination and with what exact propriety these terms 
were selected by Jesus as most exactly expressing the 
force and urgency of the desire set forth in this beati- 
tude. First of all, he who would have the blessing 
promised in the text, must want righteousness — must 
long for it, as a hungry man longs for food, or a thirsty 
man for water. Now this tests the value of all mere 
superficial professions, of all outward conformity, to 
the rule of righteousness. It is not saying, I love God 
or desire goodness, that answers the condition of the 
beatitude. It is not embalming religion in a round 
of ceremonies, or holding it up before the intellect in the 
form of a creed, orthodox or heterodox. These are but 
superficial and cutaneous before the deep requisition, 
that righteousness shall be earnestly desired, longed for, 
hungered and thirsted for. In one word, the condition 
must accord with the mind and spirit of Jesus Christ, 
who said, " My meat and my drink is to do the will of 
Him that sent me." His disciples had gone into the 
city to buy meat to answer the ordinary demands of 
appetite, but so absorbed did he become in the love and 
service of his great mission, that even those demands, 



LONGING FOE EIGHTE OUSNES S . 

imperious as they are, were forgotten, and he found a 
sustenance for his higher nature, and therefore for his 
entire nature, in doing the will of his Father who was 
in heaven. So must this desire be in us, over-master- 
ing and all-absorbing, before we fulfill the condition of 
the beatitude. 

But how can a man have this longing — how can he 
entertain this hunger and thirst — unless he perceives 
the greatness, the necessity, and the intrinsic worth of 
the thing desired ? 

Therefore it is well, as another condition of the beat- 
itude, to consider what is meant here by righteousness. 
It is not merely the single virtue of justice or rectitude 
— in fact, no virtue is absolutely single, if we look at 
it closely. A man can not really have one virtue, 
and but one, genuine and complete. He can not have 
one without having all virtues and all graces, for no 
one virtue or grace is complete without the intermin- 
gling of the life and reciprocal action of all the rest. 
We make a great mistake if we suppose otherwise. 
There have been men who could play delightful music 
on one string of the violin, but there never was a man 
who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul 
by a one-stringed virtue. If we suppose there could 
be such things as isolated virtues, that a man could 
cherish one principle, and at the same time be corrupt 
in regard to another, we make an egregious mistake. 
Can a man be thoroughly and strictly honest, and at 
the same time be a selfish man ? Can he be temperate 



gg EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUESE8. 

and at the same time unchaste — just, and yet unmerci- 
ful? So, if thoroughly analyzed, if rightly conceived in 
its essence, rectitude will stand for the significance of 
the word righteousness in the text. If we hunger and 
thirst lor rectitude with all that rectitude implies, we 
should get at the essence of the thing brought before us. 
In reality, it means a state of mind and heart ; a soil out 
of which all single virtues grow ; the spirit of all vir- 
tues, of all moral excellence, rather than any particular 
form of virtue or moral excellence* 

Then, again, it is not merely a desire to see right- 
eousness prevailing in the world at large — a longing 
for righteousness to be done — although that is includ- 
ed. I suppose, in reality, we have in this expression, 
" righteousness," or in the desire for it, the first three 
petitions in the Lord's prayer — " Hallowed be thy name; 
thy kingdom come ; thy will be done on earth as it is 
in heaven." I suppose that a man who is longing for 
righteousness is longing for the fulfillment of these three 
branches of the prayer. Sometimes men in looking 
for righteousness are thinking merely of the social 
operation of it; its prevalence in the world at large; 
the reign of justice and of right between , man and 
man. Sometimes men have been so absorbed in fur- 
thering this end and striving for it, that they may 
be said to have forgotten their own souls, and to have 
neglected their own salvation. They scorn any mean 
solicitude "for themselves in their earnest care for the 
rectification of the world. But after all, this is not 



LONGING FOE RIGHTEOUSNESS. QQ 

the essential point before us. It is the desire for a 
subjective personal condition of soul, not only for our- 
selves, but for all other men, if you please ; because, 
if that prevails, then general or social righteousness 
will prevail. But essentially it is a desire for a sub- 
jective personal condition of soul ; it is a desire not 
merely for doing righteously, but for being righteous. 
The man who has the longing suggested in the text, 
hungers and thirsts for conformity to the will of God. 
I do not know that there is any better generalization 
of the idea than that — the desire to be conformed to 
the will of God. In one word, the desire is to be like 
God. 

And what is God ? We have a distinct statement in 
the epistle of J ohn of what God is — not merely what 
his attributes are, but what the essence of the divine 
nature is. We are told that He is love. So, then, we 
come to the conclusion that the man who hungers and 
thirsts after righteousness, hungers and thirsts after con- 
formity to the will of God ; for assimilation to the na- 
ture of God ; hungers and thirsts for love or for good- 
ness. That is the meaning of it. Blessed is the man 
who longs, who yearns, who desires, who hungers, who 
thirsts for goodness — goodness that is intrinsic and 
essential to the nature of God himself. 

But in order that this desire may be enkindled with- 
in us, we must of course see in what that intrinsic good- 
ness consists. The divine goodness in us must be realized 
by us ; because, as I said in the commencement, this is 



70 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 



not a mere saying that we wish to be good. It is not pos- 
sible for a man to fulfill the conditions of this beatitude, 
unless he really sees what this desirable goodness in 
God is, so that he may hunger and thirst for it. Xow 
that goodness we can trace of course everywhere. "VTe 
behold it in one form or another wherever we turn our 
eyes ; for the fact is, that all truth is identical with 
goodness. Every manifestation of God in the natural 
world, if we can get at the core and essence of it, is 
identical with goodness. The two things are insepa- 
rable. And so wherever we look — at any arrangement 
of the universe, at any procession of phenomena, at any 
thing which proceeds immediately from the divine — 
there we see what the divine goodness is. 

But that is not enough. There has been set before 
us a complete standard of that goodness. We have in 
Jesus Christ the expression of it in its fullness and 
essence. "We can not trace it, perhaps, always in the 
material world ; sometimes we must halt, compare, and 
analyze, before we can see the meaning of things. 
There are anomalies in natural facts which can not be 
reconciled. * We have not penetrated to the core and 
essence of many dark mysteries. The man of faith has 
no doubt that these things are essentially good, and that 
the darkest shadow that fails upon man involves essen- 
tial blessedness ; but he does not see it. In Jesus 
Christ, without a cloud, the goodness of Almighty God 
stands before us. Directly in the personality of Christ 
Jesus, without a cloud, a flaw, or a break, we see that 



LONGING FOE RIGHTEOUSNESS. ^1 

f 

goodness whicii is at the heart of things, and by which 
all things are ordained and made. 

Can any man deny that in the goodness of Jesus Christ 
there is a divine attraction for the affections of his heart 
and a call for the surrender of his will ? Can you, putting 
aside all theological conceits, putting aside all vague 
notions which havti been engendered in your minds by 
education, looking at that character of Jesus Christ as 
it stands distinctly presented on the page of the Sew 
Testament, fail to love it? Oh, we give such a theo- 
logical sense to our words, that even the holiest pre- 
cepts ring like counterfeit coin. But if we really knew 
that to love Jesus Christ is like loving anything else, 
if theological or religious love would only mean natural 
love as it ought to mean, then there is no one here who 
would not say, "I love Jesus Christ." Infidels and 
skeptics, carping at miracles and cutting out one half 
of the lsew Testament, if they could see such a char- 
acter as that, exemplified in such a beautiful life, stand- 
ing in the gloriousness of its meekness and majesty of 
its holiness, they would come to it as if drawn by the 
law of attraction. 

Is it not singular that such a portraiture as that is 
presented to us, when we consider in what a broken 
way it comes? The Gospels are very fragmentary. 
"We make a mistake when we apply the laws of criti- 
cism to them as we do to a great history like that of 
Thucydides or Grote. They are mere fragments — 
mere memoirs, serving for a history, so to speak; a 



72 EXTEMPORANEOUS D I S C OUR S E 8 . 

few sketches, here and there, of Jesus Christ. And 
yet is it not remarkable that these sketches, so com- 
bined as they lie before us upon the page, present to 
us that perfect portraiture of moral goodness and 
spiritual loveliness? TTe can not suppose that to be a 
fiction. ~No man could have invented Jesus Christ; no 
man could have made a being who presents such a 
universal idea of goodness as to attract all hearts in 
all ages. There must have been some overshadowing 
reality to produce so bright a reflection. There it 
stands, that glorious portraiture; and I repeat, the 
goodness we should hunger after is -that embodied in 
Jesus Christ, who we all confess is a being to be loved. 

A great many people in their religious experience 
tell us that they have seen the time when, looking upon 
God as an awful being, with a background of immense 
sovereignty, shrouded in darkness, they have wished 
that God was only like Jesus Christ, and that such a love 
controlled and governed the universe ; and they have 
gone^to Jesus Christ as something to save them from the 
wrath of God. Oh, what a terrible, dark fact that is, 
lying at the core of some of our theologies ! J esus Christ 
is regarded as the shield that quenches the thunderbolts 
of God's wrath; as one who saves us from God, instead 
of what he represents himself to be — a being who leads 
us to God. Jesus Christ is but the reflection of the 
Divine love. There is nothing tender in him who 
blessed little children — there is nothing lovely in him 
who walked so kindly among the sorrows and wrongs 



LONGING FOE RIGHTEOUSNESS. ^3 

of humanity — there is nothing that attracts us to the 
heart of him who sat at the marriage feast in Cana, 
who mingled with the poor and suffering, who cleansed 
the leper and raised the dead — there is nothing in all 
that love that draws us to him, that is not in the Father's 
nature. If we only could see God's love, and realize 
it as expressed in Jesus Christ, we could not help 
longing for it, and praying that such, according to the 
finite capacity of our nature, might be the essence of 
our spiritual being. 

But men do not realize the goodness of God. As 
I have just told you, their creeds shut it out from 
them; they get a creed- view of God — a sharp, meta- 
physical, horrible notion of a God anxious to be just, 
and yet obliged, so to speak, to pour out his wrath 
somewhere; or else they get crude conceptions of a 
God formed out of their sensual ignorance. In the 
Hartz Mountains, in Germany, men sometimes see an 
awful, shadowy, colossal image, walking over the 
heights like a majestic demon; but, after all, they find 
it is only the projection of themselves; only the 
shadow of the advancing man thrown upon the mist 
of the mountain. So men in their superstition, sens- 
uality, and gross idolatry, project a God who is on]y 
the shadow of themselves. For the best we can do, 
after all, is to mingle our ideas of God with some- 
thing of ourselves. We can not rid ourselves of this. 
But there is, nevertheless, this in our nature, that when 
the true idea of God is presented to our mind, we 

4 



74- EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

recognize it as such. I repeat: Man is so constituted, 
that in forming a notion of God, that notion, however 
beautiful and excellent it be, will be flawed and 
blunted with some misconception ; and yet let the true 
idea of God come before him, and he will recognize it, 
So in relation to Jesus Christ; men in their sensuality 
and darkness, as in the heathen world, and in the moral 
heathenism of the present day, make a God after their 
own notion and sensuality; but when Christ comes, 
the living perception of the true God wakes up in them, 
and they see what he is. 

So men have a God in science — an intellectual God 
— a first cause — the cause of all causes, the mover of 
all motions. It is true no man can pursue a scientific 
investigation of the universe with clear eyes and a right 
heart without seeing goodness in every phenomenon. 
They see that God is not merely intelligence, but love. 
That is the demonstration of science as well as the utter- 
ance of the gospel. But men do come to look upon 
God as simply the great cord that binds together the sep- 
arate fagots. Indeed, some say we have nothing to do 
with first causes ; that science has to do with phenomena 
only, and we must not attempt to penetrate the mystery 
with which first causes are shrouded. But, in some way 
or other, men can not rid themselves of the idea that 
God is hidden in these, and, in consequence of their 
creeds and educational notions, they contrive to throw 
him into the dark, awful background, and to see nothing 
but the goodness that is in Jesus Christ, and long for 



LONGING FOE RIGHTEOUSNESS. ^5 

that. But the goodness of Christ is the goodness of 
God himself; and when that becomes clearly revealed, 
when we get a measure of the fullness of that excel- 
lence, when we see what that all-embracing love is, 
then we can not help longing for it. TTe shall hunger 
and thirst for it — hunger and thirst for it for its own 
sake ; for this is the righteousness essentially presented 
to us in the beatitude of the text. 

Such, then, being the condition of this beatitude, let 
us in the next place consider its nature or result. We 
have just considered what the object to be desired is. 
]STow what is the result of that hunger and thirst — not 
the arbitrary consequence, but the inevitable law ; 
For, as from time to time I have urged the truth con- 
tained in the beatitudes before you, I have insisted upon 
this as the central point : that all the blessings prom- 
ised are not arbitrary, but are legal — they come by 
law ; it is so that we can not help having this result. 
" Blessed are the meek, for they shall [they must] in- 
herit the earth; blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs 
is the kingdom of heaven ; blessed are they that do hun- 
ger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall [they 
must] be filled." It is the law — the inevitable law, in 
the case. The result is, that he who truly hungers for 
righteousness or goodness shall be filled with right- 
eousness or goodness. This is the nature of the bless- 
ing. He shall be filled with the very thing he desires. 

This brings us to consider a little the statement I 
made just now, that goodness is to be sought for its own 



76 



EXTEMPORANEOUS D IS C OUR SE8. 



sake — not for something else — not for something done. 
"We are to hunger and thirst after righteousness for 
righteousness' sake, and the blessing promised to us is, 
that we shall be filled with it. Now that strikes at a 
great many religious works and religious experiences 
and thoughts, because in reality a great many, I am 
afraid, are not hungering for righteousness and good- 
ness, but for the rewards of righteousness and good- 
ness. A system of rewards and punishments is the 
highest conception they get of the essential glory, 
grandeur, and obligation of religion. They are thirst- 
ing after heaven — after a good hereafter, in reward for 
the sacrifices they make in this world. They are carry- 
ing this world into the other. It is the old system — 
so much per cent, on everything you invest — projected 
out of Wall Street into the New Jerusalem. Is this 
the principle of the divine kingdom ? Is this the feel- 
ing of men who have really known what it is to hunger 
and thirst after righteousness? Did Paul in his im- 
prisonment and bondage, with stripes and scars upon 
him, look merely for some payment from God by- 
and-by? No; in his storm-dashed ship, in his lonely 
wanderings, in the dungeon at Philippi, he sang 
praises, rejoiced, pressed forward, and felt that in the 
very effort of seeking for righteousness and assimilation 
to the spirit of Jesus Christ he had his reward. 

And this was the case with every great and true man 
that ever lived and labored in the spirit of Christ Jesus. 
Luther, as he sought to reform a corrupt religion; 



L03TGIXG FOE KIGHTEOUSNESS. 77 

Clarkson, as he rolled on the wheels of emancipation, 
and every good man, toiling and suffering martyrdom, 
sometimes has found in the joy of doing righteousness 
the reward of having that righteousness. They felt 
what it is to be filled with the blessedness set before us 
in the text. Seeking heaven through righteousness is 
not seeking righteousness, but something else; it is 
not loving goodness for goodness' sake, but for its re- 
wards. We are to seek God, not heaven — to strive to 
be righteous, not happy. That is eternal life. What a 
mistake there is in the interpretation of this phrase! 
Eternal life, as some people think, is merely life with- 
out end — protracted existence — striking harp-strings, 
singing hallelujahs, walking golden streets, reclining 
on the banks of the river of life, casting down crowns 
before the Lamb, always having the blessed joy of exist- 
ence, continually having some good that comes in con- 
sequence of actions done by them in this world. Is that 
eternal life ? or is it merely duration? That is not the 
idea. It is not the idea conveyed in the misinterpreted 
phrase, everlasting life and everlasting punishment. 
The idea of duration is not the main point there; it is 
substance, not duration — spiritual condition, not pro- 
tracted time. What does Christ say in the chapter I 
read this morning? "He that believeth on me, hath 
everlasting life " not shall have it bv-and-bv. "This is 
life eternal." What — to go to heaven? Xo; "this is 
life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true 
God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." And until 



78 EXTEMPOEANE 0US DISCOUESES. 

we come to that idea, we grossly misinterpret the Scrip- 
tures. Eternal life is spiritual substance, present and 
incident to the possessor. In other words, it is the very 
righteousness set before us in the text. That is it. 
"We have it now; we have it when we assimilate to 
ourselves the goodness and excellence of God. And 
whatever other promises may convey, whatever of 
outward good they may actually bestow, all the essence, 
all the good is embraced in this righteousness. 

Suppose a man, for instance, pursuing a course of 
virtue, a course of temperance, or of rectitude, has the 
promise that he shall be wealthy, and that he shall 
have long life — shall make a fortune, and shall be 
respected. That is all very good; but what is the es- 
sence of all this? It is in being righteous; that is the 
great blessing. So that if you have a long life, it is a 
righteous life ; and if you have wealth, it is righteous 
wealth, as you make a righteous use and disposition of 
it. "With this, any condition is blessed ; without it, no 
condition is blessed. So the essence of all promises is 
in the possession of this intrinsic righteousness. 

So you see, my friends, again, how true it is that 
man shall be filled. There is great significance in that 
expression, "filled;" or, as it maybe translated, "sat- 
isfied." " Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst 
after righteousness, for they shall be filled." Xow 
nothing could more emphatically express the peculiar 
character of man — a creature who needs to be filled, 
needs something that will satisfy — a being of an im- 



LONGING FOE RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

mortal, limitless nature. It is a great thing sometimes 
in this world, when you are going to make a present to 
a person, to know what will exactly suit that person's 
tastes or wants. A toy that will delight a little child, 
will not please one who is older. That which will 
please this kind of a man, will not suit that. To get 
the exact thing, therefore, that will satisfy the peculiar 
taste or want of a person, constitutes the great value 
of the gift, rather than its cost. Xow, Jesus Christ 
knows, when he makes the promise, exactly what man 
wants. Man wants to be filled; he wants something 
that will satisfy. Man's peculiarity above all other 
beings is this ever-restless seeking after something. 
Not only the wicked are like the troubled sea that 
can not rest, but humanity itself is in some respects 
like it. A great deal of the glory of man comes out 
of this restlessness. He can not be content with the 
present condition, nor with stagnation. And this is 
the glory and hope of things, even in the darkest hour. 
We often think, when things are very bad, that they 
can not remain so, because man is so constituted, that 
lie can not rest contented with them. All achievements 
■and plans of action come out of this restlessness. But, 
being thus constituted, there is only one thing that 
can satisfy man, and that is righteousness— goodness. 
That is the only thing that can fill him, strengthen 
him, and make him complete at any time, under all 
conditions. 

I need not make a recapitulation of that which man's 



EXTEMPORANEOUS BISCOUESES. 

experience continually verifies, that no man ever was 
satisfied with worldly good. And this is no ascetic, or 
puritanical, or pharisaical admonition in reference to 
worldly good. Xo man of common sense condemns the 
good of this world that is really good — that which has 
not evil in itself or in its use — which does not lead 
directly to evil. The fair light, the blessed air, social 
enjoyment — each of these is good in its place. No man 
of common sense condemns these, or speaks of worldly 
good, in itself, as something that is forbidden and sinful. 
Not at all. But there is one thing to be said of the 
best form of worldly good. It may be good; it may 
be innocent; it may be useful; it is all right in its 
place, but it can not satisfy. That is the whole of it ; 
it can not fill up the depth of your nature. 

The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes felt this. He 
went all through with the world in some of its evil, 
as well as its better phases, perhaps. He had every- 
thing it could give. I do not believe that, in our age 
of railroads and telegraphs, we have more means of 
worldly enjoyment than Solomon had, or he who 
speaks for him — the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes 
— and after going all through with it, in the end he 
was compelled to say, not with any morbid pharisaic 
disposition, but as the result of a higher spirit, " Van- 
ity of vanities, all is vanity. 55 It could not satisfy, it 
could not fill him. There are moments when every man 
feels it ; there are moments when that which is immor 
tal in his nature will assert itself, and that which grav 



LONGING FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

itates to higher things will make itself known. Some- 
thing is taken from ns — sometimes a thing that is famil- 
iar and dear to us. Then we feel that all this world's 
good is insufficient to make up its loss. Take away 
the health of a man who has all his days been permit- 
ted to have the regular beat of his pulse, the kindly 
glow of his blood, the free and full respiration of his 
lungs, and let some little muscle be paralyzed, or some 
pain settle within him, and what is the good of all this 
world? Unless be can go within himself, and there 
find resources, how is it all darkened, and rendered 
terrible ! 

A dear friend, a child, is taken away. All things 
else become valueless or secondary. Sometimes this is 
a morbid state, but we feel as if it were true. It is a 
great lesson, teaching us that this world is not the high- 
est good, when a bereavement of that kind will make 
all other things secondary. 

I was much struck in reading about a nobleman 
who died a few days since. He had an iron safe, or 
chest, all locked up, but marked : " To be removed 
first, in case of fire." "When he died, his friends 
opened that chest, supposing, of course, that some 
valuable document, or deed of property, rich jewelry, 
or costly plate, would be found in it. But what did 
they find? They found the toys of his little child, 
who had gone before him. Richer to him were they 
than all the world's wealth, richer than his coronet ; 
brighter than all the jewels that sparkled on its crest. 

4* 



g2 EXTEMPOE ANEOUS DISCOTTKSES. 

Not his estate, not his jewels, not his equipage, nothing 
glorious and great in this world ; but the dearest ob- 
jects to him were the toys of his little child. 

Thus we see that worldly good is secondary — that it 
can not satisfy. So it is with intellectual attainment. 
From its very nature it gives us no rest, and was not 
meant to give it. It is the glory of the intellect, that 
it is always panting and longing for some higher 
thing ; always wanting to soar ; always seeking to 
gain some more lofty eminence. " Excelsior" is the 
continual watchword of the intellect, and it was meant 
to be so. It is its very essence and power that we can 
not rest contented with present attainment. But then 
there are times when we are not all intellect. There 
never was a man all intellect, but just in proportion as 
men become so, they become like those higher mount- 
ains of the earth — all ice and snow as they rise above 
the warm heart of the earth. But man is not all in- 
tellect. He has feeling; he has times of weakness. 
Though he may solve great mathematical problems, 
he suffers, he pines, he needs help and sympathy ; for 
all the truth that is gathered in the bright realms of 
intellect do not satisfy. There is only one thing that 
will, and Jesus Christ saw it. Goodness will satisfy. 
TSot that a man will be satisfied with what goodness 
he attains at present. He is always seeking for it ; 
and as he seeks, it is sure to come, sure to meet him. 
Just as he desires, the measure is filled up. That is 
the one thing that will satisfy — a thing that he can 



LONGING FOE RIGHTEOUSNESS. g3 

fall back upon. That can not be taken away from 
him. 

You remember the storv of the old man who had 

«/ 

forgotten the names of his children, and the names of 
his early friends, long buried and slumbering in the 
church-yard. They tried to arouse him, and awaken 
bis recollection by some association, to bring to him 
the life to which he clung like an old leaf in the early 
winter. They mentioned name after name, but to no 
effect, until that of Jesus Christ was mentioned, when 
he said, " Yes, I remember that name." 

Goodness is the last thing that goes out of a man. 
He loses his intellect and his bodily vigor, but if he 
has been true and good, his goodness does not forsake 
him. There is something vital and enduring in that ; 
it will remain when everything else is taken away. 
"When we can get nothing else, we can have goodness 
and righteousness. TVe may be deprived of the op- 
portunities of enjoyment; sickness may be upon us; 
the bright sunlight may be shut out ; spring-time may 
come with its heraldry of flowers, and we may not 
be permitted to enjoy the glorious sight ; but we can 
have goodness in the dark, sick chamber. Intellect- 
ual privileges may be denied us; we maybe forbid- 
den to read and write, or to do anything, and yet the 
goodness of God Almighty will continue to flow. It 
may be that we can not do anything ; that the world 
must rush on, unaided by our help ; that in the great 
vineyard which is spread out, we can not work; but 



54 EXTEMPO E ANE OTJS DISCOURSES. 

we can serve God still ; we can suffer and take inflic- 
tions patiently, and there is no condition where we 
can not be satisfied in the enjoyment of righteousness. 

This is the end, then, which we are to seek in all con- 
ditions, and by all means. That is the point ; right- 
eousness is the principal thing. It is not one special 
form ; if it had been, other good things in this world 
would have been neglected. Suppose righteousness 
had been the doing; of some one thing, then men would 
have neglected their business, their daily cares, their 
ordinary relationship, to rush and to do that one thing. 
That is the way it has been misconceived by some ; it 
has been considered bv some as one thino 1 — a form, a 
pilgrimage, a round of prayers, a shutting ourselves up 
from the world. 

Yes, thank God, you can hunger and thirst after 
righteousness. If you are driving a nail, planing a 
board, selling a piece of cloth, doing any kind of 
work, hunger and thirst after righteousness. In all 
that you are doing, hunger and thirst after righteous- 
ness. Oh, what a blessed thing is that ! And remem- 
ber there is no warrant that we shall have anything 
else than this in this world. You have no assurance 
of life, happiness, health, or reputation ; but you may 
be sure you shall have goodness if you seek it. It is 
true in one sense, as one has well said, that whatever 
we would have, we can take if we pay for it — good or 
evil. There is a law of that kind : " Seek, and ye shall 
find." ~SVe can have it, but we must pay for it. You 



LONGING FOE EIGIITEOUSXESS. g5 

can have pleasure, but you must pay for it in a wasted 
life, a ruined or impaired nature. You can have 
wealth, but you must pay for it, perhaps, in honorable, 
drudging service, or, as many have paid for it, in a 
blasted reputation. But you are not sure even in 
regard to these things. It is by no means certain 
when you have your wealth or reputation, that you 
will enjoy it. Something may come in to prevent it. 
But there is one thing certain — one thing which can 
not fail you, but can give you unending and inalien- 
able joy. In Christ's words you hear what it is, and 
all men who have responded to those words in holy 
effort, corroborate what he has said — " Blessed are they 
which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they 
shall be filled." 



LIFE IN CHRIST, 



As the living Father hath sent me, and I live "by the ITathei ; so h9 
that eateth me, even he shall live "by me. — J ohn vi. 57. 



TJR Saviour, in many instances, taught the truth 



in such a way as not only to instruct the hearts 
of those who gathered around him, but to test their 
dispositions. Those among his hearers who were in 
spiritual sympathy with him, whose instincts and de- 
sires were truthful, would be incited to penetrate the 
mystery or the symbolism of his language, and where 
they did not distinctly see all its meaning, they would 
feel its general purport ; while there were others gath- 
ered around him, who, even seeing, would not perceive 
— who, hearing, would not understand, because they 
grasped only the literal meaning of the teacher's words, 
and interpreted them by their pre-conceptions. Such 
appears to have been the case in the instance connected 
with the text. Christ had described himself as the 
bread that came down from heaven, and in the inten- 
sity of the illustration suggested by the idea, he had 
urged upon his hearers the vital necessity of partaking 
of his flesh and of his blood. Upon this, many of his 




gg EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

disciples exclaimed, "This is a hard saying; who can 
hear it?" and some of them, turning away, followed 
him no more. But others, though they may not have 
comprehended all his meaning, felt that what he said 
was profoundly true — was fitted to their deepest wants; 
and when Jesus asked them, "Will ye also go away?" 
they replied, through the lips of Peter, "Lord, to whom 
shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life." 
Thus, then, those whose minds and hearts were not 
essentially disposed toward truth, stumbled at language 
which bade them eat the flesh and drink the blood of 
him who spoke to them ; but to those who sought the 
substance of the truth involved in that symbolism, the 
Saviour himself furnished the key, for he told them not 
to take his words grossly and literally. "It is the 
spirit that quicken eth," said he; "the flesh profiteth 
nothing. The words that I speak unto you, they are 
spirit and they are life." 

It seems, my friends, that this text, especially the 
latter clause of it — while I do not wish to say anything 
that looks like a play upon words — suggests two or 
three important points for consideration. "He that 
eateth me, even he shall live by me." In the first 
place, we live by Jesus Christ. I refer you to the 
statement that I have just made in interpreting what I 
am about to say. The material simile of eating Jesus, 
and living by him, unfolds a vital and spiritual mean- 
ing. I need not tell you how strangely this phraseol- 
ogy has been misconstrued. We know that one great 



LIFE IN CHEIST. £9 

section of the Christian body has built np upon fa the 
stupendous doctrine of transubstantiation ; and around 
this nucleus, the literal interpretation of the words of 
Jesus, has been constructed a gorgeous and awful cere- 
monial. We can hardly ever look upon that great 
church, 1 think, without respect and admiration for 
many things, when we see how its cathedrals are dot- 
ting a thousand lands, and hear its litanies chanted 
around the globe. But we think, also, amid the gor- 
geous ceremonies, pealing psalms, and fumes of the 
censer, there are hundreds and thousands who now 
believe that the process is now going on of transmuting 
the literal bread into the flesh of the Lord Jesus Christ 
— so strangely have these words been interpreted, such 
a vital and cardinal doctrine has been made out of 
them, and so widely have they been believed in this 
sense. 

And yet, while we discard this literal interpretation, 
let me be permitted to observe that the symbolism in 
the text is an exact symbolism. In other words, it is 
as true that we need spiritually to assimilate Christ to 
ourselves, as that we need physically to assimilate 
material substance to our bodily organism, in order 
that our animal existence may be maintained. And 
we shall perceive this truth as soon us we understand 
what in the profoundest sense life is, or what it is to 
live. 

" He that eateth me, shall live by me. 55 What is it 
to live? I observe that anything truly lives when it 



90 EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

fills up the capacities of its being ; and anything is 
dead, just in proportion as its faculties or functions are 
inoperative. When, in the frame of an animal, pulsa- 
tion ceases, and the breath is gone, we say of it that it 
is dead, although, as mere matter, that frame is alive 
with energy. Life in the animal does not consist 
merely in material force, but in organic vitality ; and, 
therefore, we regard the distinct force of the organic vi- 
tality, and if that is gone, although the material forces 
operate, it is dead. But in man we rise to a still higher 
grade. We see in him not only material force and or- 
ganic vitality, but an element of spiritual existence. He 
has within him that which the brute has not — this ele- 
ment of spiritual existence. Surely, then, man does 
not really live — is not alive to the full extent of his 
being, when he exists only as an animal — has only 
breath and pulsation, sense and appetite. Some may 
call this living, and think it is living. It may be all 
they comprehend in their idea of being alive — per- 
haps it is all they have ever known of living — but no 
man can be largely self-conscious — no man can look 
into his own nature and trace the deep lines of his own 
experience, and then think that all life consists in this 
mere animal, organic form of living. 

And here comes up the old, everlasting fact — old, yet 
always new, always fresh in its suggestion — that man 
is not, like the brute, satisfied with meat and drink, 
but has faculties which overleap all sensual indulgence. 
"When we are appalled by the spectacle of universal 



LIFE IN CHRIST. 



91 



decay ; when for a moment we start back at the phe- 
nomenon of death, seeing those we live with, and with 
whom we are associated, dropping around us like 
autumn leaves ; when our vision fails to penetrate be- 
yond the dark boundary that limits the horizon of this 
life, we always fall back with great confidence and as- 
surance upon the thought, that there are in man facul- 
ties that the material objects of this life do not satisfy ; 
there are within him powers that develop beyond the 
limitations and resources of this life. We look around 
upon nature, and see all other creatures filling up the 
full orbit of their being, every faculty employed — 
every desire satisfied. There is the air, through which 
the free wings of the bird may beat ; there is the sun- 
shine that awakens the joyousness of its song ; there is 
everything adapted to it, to call out the fullness and 
glory of its being. Man alone is the unsatisfied one ; 
man alone yearns for that which is higher— that which 
is beyond. But assured that there is harmony in the 
universe, we say that there must be something more 
than the animal and material, something more than 
meat and drink. Almost all men feel this. I say 
almost all men, because there are spiritual idiots as 
well as intellectual idiots. There are men, I mean, 
whose whole spiritual nature seems totally dead ; who, 
perhaps, may have no throbbing instinct of a higher 
life — no sense of spiritual being; but taking men in 
their normal condition, I repeat, every man has some 
sense of this higher life within him demanding some- 



92 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

thing better and more exalted than the objects of this 
outward world. 

I speak of the deep consciousness of men. Man is 
concentric ; you have to take fold after fold off of him 
before you get to the center of his personality. His 
clothing sometimes makes up a great deal of him ; 
then comes his skin — the color of it; then his mus- 
cle ; then his shape ; and lastly his skeleton, and this 
makes up his material status and position. You have 
got to get below his animal nature, habits, customs, 
affections, daily life, and sometimes go away down 
into the heart of the man, before you know what is 
really in him. But when you get there, you will find 
the testimony true which I am urging. So far as we 
can judge men by their outward appearance, a great 
many of them live merely for the meat and drink. 
They are satisfied perfectly with that which this life 
gives them. Some of them, indeed, compel us to fear 
this most appalling fact : that their circumstances are 
such that the actual necessities of this life afford them 
scarcely an opportunity to show a higher yearning. 
They can not lift up their heads and breathe the free air 
of the world; they can not look over the limits of their 
necessities. It is not the mere external condition of 
men that we should mourn over ; it is not poverty ; it 
is not a hard state of living ; but the condition which 
is connected with such a state in which men, for their 
daily bread alone, for their immediate imperious ne- 
cessities, are compelled so to live, so to overwhelm 



LIFE IN CHRIST. 93 

themselves with the wants and cares of this life, that 
they can hardily manifest or develop any faculty for 
something higher. 

But however this may be, if yon go down into the 
center of men's souls, if you get into the last core 
of these concentric rings of personality, you find this 
sense of the infinite, this consciousness of immortality, 
linked to something higher and better. You pass 
every day men in the street, you meet every day 
with acquaintances, you consort every day with inti- 
mate friends, and you do not know how deeply this 
feeling may prevail in them. You have no right to 
question the religious feeling of a man as manifested 
by him because it does not accord perfectly with your 
ideas. You have no right to question the religious- 
ness of his soul because his form of expressing it is 
not like yours. You can not tell what solitary hours 
he has, what great and awful realities, what profound 
experiences stir the depths of his soul. Xo doubt 
nine out of ten, ay, ninety-nine out of a hundred, 
have this spirit-yearning, which proves to us, as I have 
said, that man needs something to live for more than 
meat and drink and earthy conditions. 

My friends, if you should take the human heart and 
listen to it, it would be like listening to a sea-shell; 
you would hear in it the hollow murmur of the infinite 
ocean to which it belongs, from which it draws its pro- 
foundest inspiration, and for which it yearns. Man, 
then, has a higher nature, which must have its ali- 



94 



EXTEMPOB ANE0US DISCOUESES. 



ment, its food, or practically and essentially that na- 
ture dies. It is the peculiarity of Christianity that it 
announces this truth. Perhaps if there is one central 
fact of Christianity, one peculiarity upon which it is 
based, more than all others, it is this : that it has made 
man conscious of his inward life; it has shown to each 
man the immortality of his own soul. It is one thing to 
believe, as some philosophers do, speculatively, in im- 
mortality; to reason out a future life, like Plato or 
Cicero. It is another thing for each man to feel his 
own immortality; to be conscious of the spiritual 
essence of his own inward nature. And this was what 
Christianity did. It gave to men a profound convic- 
tion of their own spiritual being. They realized it as 
they never realized it before. They were convinced 
of it and knew it. It was to them that Jesus Christ 
addressed himself. This was the reason why he look- 
ed below the outward conditions, why he consorted 
with the publican and sinner as with the scribe and 
pharisee. This was the reason why the Samaritan 
was as precious to him as the Jew; why he died for 
all, and not for some. He saw the spiritual nature of 
man in all its priceless capacity, in all its quenchless 
immortality, and to that he spoke, to that he addressed 
himself when he bade his hearers eat of his flesh and 
drink of his blood, saying, "He that eateth me, shall 
live by me." 

Each kind or nature in the universe is linked in its 
own chain of dependencies. The body depends on 



LIFE IN CHEIST. 95 

things material, and those things material in turn have 
a material source. "Were it not for the unmistakable 
lineaments which they present, and were we to con- 
sider nothing but the material phenomena of nature, 
we might say that this perhaps is true; that matter 
only proves the existence of matter. But the moment 
we look upon the soul of man — that which is deepest 
and most peculiar, that which distinguishes him from 
all animal existence, that which constitutes his human- 
ity — we must ascribe it to some higher source than 
matter. Toil may possibly suppose that this curiously- 
molded body, this harp of a thousand strings, this 
manifold organization, had a material origin; but you 
can not think that the affection of the human heart is 
born of the dust; you can not think that the yearning 
for the beautiful and good which springs up in the soul 
of man comes merely out of the slime of matter, or out 
of the abyss of our mere sensual nature, Whence 
comes love so mighty, breathing in every heart; 
whence the gravitation and attraction of the social 
world, if not from loving sources? Whence comes 
the intelligence of man? You can not suppose that to 
have sprung from the dust, simply by the conditions 
of material nature. Whence comes mounting and 
deathless thought that soars beyond the highest stars 
and seeks the unities of nature ? Surely you can not 
suppose that this, the crown of man's nature, has all 
come from dust and ashes. And whence man's sense 
of sin, his consciousness of moral freedom, the deep, 



QQ EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

earnest breathings of conscience ? Whence come they ? 
Are they the suggestions of a nature that has sprung 
from the dust, and returns back to nothingness? If 
you could take away every other proof of the exist- 
ence of a God; if you could blot out the universe with 
all its glorious elements of harmony, order, and won- 
der; yet, looking into the deep soul of man, and be- 
holding there a sense of sin, a feeling of obligation, of 
duty, of responsibility, you would be compelled to say, 
this soul of man proves the existence of a moral, in- 
telligent source over and above the material world. 

Each thing is linked to things of its own kind. The 
soul of man, living, intelligent, and morally conscious, 
is linked to an intelligent and moral God, and by him 
and in him alone can it live. The soul of man, this 
intelligent, this living, this moral nature of man, can 
not link itself to mere sensation and matter — can not 
live merely by material things — by the world's wealth, 
its fame — by meat, drink, ease, and raiment. It de- 
pends for its development, for its noblest action, for its 
highest end, upon communion with the infinite intelli- 
gence, love, and freedom from which it came. 

Now Jesus Christ came to bring mankind into com- 
munion with that infinite intelligence, love, and free- 
dom, by bringing man's soul into communion with him- 
self, so that living in J esus Christ, we might live in the 
Father, and living by Jesus, we might be brought into 
communion with our highest life and highest possibil- 
ities. As Christ becomes assimilated to our inner 



LIFE IN CUEIST. 97 

spiritual being, so we truly live. There is no vague- 
ness about this at all. It is the simple statement of 
the truth. "WTien Jesus says, "I came to reveal the 
Father; I came to bring you to life in me, and in the 
Father, 55 he utters no vague, mysterious truth. He 
came to bring our nature, our spiritual being, into 
communion with himself, that, by communing with 
himself, we might commune with God, and thus truly 
live. 

Each thing, I repeat, lives according to its kind ; the 
heart by love, the intellect by truth, the higher nature 
of man by intimate communion with God, the infinite 
source and origin of life and truth, and it is Christ 
alone who brings us into full communion with the 
Father. By what else are we brought into such con- 
tact with God? Nature reveals God to us. shows us 
the work of the Almighty, inspires us with some dim 
consciousness of the greatness of God; but to know 
the love of God, to be intimate with the beatings of 
that infinite heart, to be brought into the full glory of 
that all-embracing, intelligent freedom and love, we 
can only come by Jesus Christ. Xo other thing, no 
other object, stands before to effect this purpose. It is 
not bv our own reason that we can be brought folly 
into communion with God, though we may feel after 
him, if haply we may find him. It is not by scientific 
truth that we can find him, except in one aspect. We 
can only feel, and be brought into communion with the 
e-ssence of God, which is love, as we come into com- 



98 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

munion with the spirit of Jesus Christ. Therefore, 
speaking of our highest, truest, undying life, it is true, 
as Jesus said, that he who eateth him — that is, he who 
assimilates his spirit — lives by him in the highest and 
noblest sense of living. 

But look at another point which the last clause of 
this text presents. We not only live in Jesus, but we 
live by him. " He that eateth me, shall live by me." 
That brings particularly into view the essential person- 
ality of Jesus Christ. Those phrases in the New Tes- 
tament which dwell so much upon the personality of 
Christ Jesus, where he says, for instance, "I am the 
bread that came down from heaven;" "I. am the way, 
the truth, and the life;" " Believe on the Lord Jesus 
Christ, and thou shalt be saved ;" "He that believeth 
in me hath everlasting life" — those phrases we should 
not be afraid of interpreting too literally. If you look 
at them, they are very wonderful and peculiar in the 
scheme of Christianity. There never was any other 
teacher that spoke in such a way. Neither Plato, Con- 
fucius, nor any of the wise men of antiquity ever said, 
"I am the truth." They may have said, "Believe in 
this principle, this truth," but never, " I am the truth, 
the way, the life; believe in me." There is something 
very peculiar in this personality of Christ — this con- 
scious personality. It means something; it is the 
peculiar essence of Christianity. In this very form of 
statement, Christ is brought into personal prominence, 
and stands before the world, not merely as a moral 



LIFE IN CHRIST. 99 

teacher or revealer of truth, but as a Saviour. The 
way in which he saves us is not merely by the truth 
revealed, but by himself. ~SVe are brought into con- 
tact with the spirit and personality of Jesus Christ 
himself. This is something more than believing a doc- 
trine about Jesus Christ. Doctrines are valuable when 
they are vital. When you get the truth taught by 
Jesus Christ vitalized in your soul, and you practice it 
in your life, it becomes efficacious and powerful; but 
when you merely give assent to it, there is no efficacy 
nor power in it. To assent to a creed, and say, "I be- 
lieve in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ 
whom he has sent, and in the communion and fellow- 
ship of the Holy Spirit" — what does that amount to? 
It is simply an assent that is sacramental in its charac- 
ter; vou might as well think of being saved by having 
a piece of Christ's garment, or of the wood of the 
cross, as by giving an intellectual assent to creeds and 
forms. But to believe in him is to precipitate your 
soul upon him. That is the only way to manifest your 
belief, and the only way in which a man is saved. 
There is no real belief when a man says one thing and 
acts the contrary. When he says, I ought to do so and 
so, and does it, then he believes it ; but when he says, I 
ought to do so and so, and does not do it, then he does 
not believe it. So, I repeat, in regard to Jesus Christ: 
when we believe in him, we precipitate our souls upon 
him; we bring him into communion with ourselves; 
we assimilate him to ourselves; we eat and drink him. 



100 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

There is no language which, could express the meaning 
better than that, because to eat and drink are terms 
that are coupled with the intimate assimilation of a 
thing. 

What is it to believe in Jesus Christ? Is it to be- 
lieve that he is the second person of the Trinity, or 
that he pre-existed? Is it to believe in dogmas in re- 
gard to the atonement, and in the fall of man, from 
which he delivers us? To believe in Christ is to believe 
in him as the way, the truth, and the divine life; to be- 
lieve that in him is the substance of all spiritual excel- 
lence ; to believe that his life is the best life, and ought 
to be ours, and to transfer it to ourselves. " This is 
eternal life : to know thee, the true God, and Jesus Christ 
whom thou hast sent." I touched upon that last Sab- 
bath morning. I told you the great thing, after all, 
was the substance of spiritual being, not the question 
of duration in the matter of eternal life. "He that 
believeth on me hath everlasting life" — not shall have 
it ; not shall go to heaven and wear a crown of glory, 
and cast it down before God, through all the ages of 
eternity; not shall be saved from hell; but he that 
believes in me, hath now everlasting life. How dare 
you put that everlasting life the other side of the 
grave, dividing it off as by a sharp fence? We have 
it now. All considerations of time and eternity are 
canceled in this profound spiritual realization. If any 
man asks me how I interpret certain texts that speak 
of eternal life and punishment, I answer thus: They 



LIFE IN CHRIST. 

do not refer to duration, but to spiritual substance. A 
man is in everlasting punishmeut when he is in sin, 
but he is in eternal life when he is in Jesus Christ; 
and that is a process going on now and forever, here 
and hereafter, in this world and the other; not shut 
off by any sharp division of the grave, not put far off 
into the other world. The soul that sins, dies ; in the 
day that it eats, it dies. 

Oh, that we could look more at the substance of the 
thing, and not at place and duration ! We are saved 
as we are assimilated to Christ the Lord, as our spirit 
becomes like his, as we eat and drink of him. Saved 
from what ? Not merely from punishment, not merely 
from the consequences of transgression. Alas! that 
men should be forever dodging consequences; that 
they should care for nothing but the consequences, but 
would wallow in sin, would run a career of vice, would 
live meanly and basely in the lowest kennels of de- 
bauchery if it were not for the consequences. What 
a mean, low conception of what man ought to be ! Be 
afraid of sin, not the consequences ; of alienation from 
God, not the consequences. Be afraid of not eating 
and drinking Jesus Christ, until you become one with 
him, not the consequences. Pray to be saved from sin, 
not from punishment. Pray to be saved from your self- 
ish self — froin the appetites that drive you with head- 
long velocity to destruction — from the abasement that 
removes you from communion with God. Pray to be 
saved from the corruption that is in the heart Come 



EXTEMPOEANEuUS DISCOUBSES. 

to Jesus Christ; eat and drink of him till he becomes 
one with yon, and thus are you saved. 

And oh, in this great truth, how much controversy 
would vanish ! how much of the essential meaning of 
Christian sects would come out! Here, after all, is the 
bond of communion of the Christian Church; not in 
dogmas about Christ Jesus ; not in doctrines concern- 
ing his nature; not in interpretations of the schemes of 
the Almighty in the gospel, but in Christ Jesus himself. 

If ever there arises — as I verily believe there will — 
a church broad as the earth, ample as the free spirit 
of God Almighty, and glorious as the truth that came 
from heaven, a church of devout men and free minds, 
a church that shall not be hedged in by intellectual 
limitations, but bound only by one great cord of unity, 
that cord will be union with Christ Jesus. Then meet- 
ing with him, taking hold of him, touching him, we 
shall come together. Oh, these crooked roads of diver- 
sity through which the sects have wandered! these 
briers and thorns of controversy! these weary specu- 
lations! Come out of them; come to the center from 
which you have diverged, and you shall meet Jesus 
Christ— Catholic, Protestant, Presbyterian, Universal- 
ist. "We may not agree in a statement about him, 
but believing in him, and touching him, we shall all 
be one. 

But there is one other point suggested in the text, 
"He that eateth me, shall live by me." This is a 
statement of present living. It gives us the idea of 



LIFE IN CHRIST. ^03 

actual, steady, habitual living — riot merely going to 
live — not living for Jesus Christ, but by Jesus Christ. 
And this, I think, is the great peculiarity of genuine 
religion. It is an end, not a means. It is not some- 
thing that helps us to live by-and-by, but something 
by which we live now. Men talk of living for heaven, 
living for eternal things, all by-and-by. Put aside this 
little indulgence now, and you shall get something in 
heaven; be very humble now, and you will be radiant 
with glory hereafter. It is all coming by-and-by ; we 
would like to have it now, but if we deny ourselves 
of it here, we shall indulge in it freely hereafter. This 
is the substantial idea, though I may have stated it 
uncouthly. Now religion is living according to the 
truth now — heaven now, heaven always ; gradations, 
if you please, higher than the stars, mounting upward 
to brighter spheres of action ; but religion in its bliss 
and glory, heaven in its essence now, and not merely 
hereafter. 

My friends, the great essential things are those we 
live by. The great things of life are the things we 
live by — that we must have day by day. Bread— are 
we living for it merely, or by it? The water that 
gushes from the rock, flows over the land, and baptizes 
the world with blessings ; are we living for it or by it ? 
Are we living for air, or by air, for light, or by light ? 
Then ask whether we should live for religion, or by it, 
for heaven, or by it, for Jesus Christ, or by him. The 
intellect lives by knowledge, and not merely for it. 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

It is not merely for the fact that it is to be got by ex- 
ercise; it ripens and develops by what it has; it lives 
in the joy of triumphant knowledge, now and forever. 
The heart lives by its affections. It is the noblest 
manifestation of affection that it lives for others ; but 
the heart lives by affection, and wants nothing else. 
The mother lives by that love. That stands when every- 
thing else is gone, even when life is denied. When 
her boy becomes a prodigal and a wanderer, in the 
sacredness of her love, burning like a perpetual lamp 
in the tomb, she lives. Jesus Christ lived in the joy 
of his love, even when all the world was against him. 
"When the spear-point pierced him, when the Roman 
insulted him, and the ruler of the people derided him, 
he lived in the greatness of that love, and rejoiced 
even on the cross. To live by love is the glory of the 
human heart ; to live by truth is the glory of the human 
intellect; to live by Jesus Christ is the true glory and 
essence of religion. The great essential reward and 
glory of religion is here now and forever — not sepa- 
rated by things of time, but sustained in substantial 
possession. 

Men say, by and-by we shall see God, by-and-by we 
shall see that glorious heaven and its array of beauty 
and wonder. How will you see it ? "What has the 
Apostle said? "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, 
neither have entered into the heart of man. the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love him/' 
How do you suppose this is to be interpreted ?— that as 



LIFE IN CHRIST. 

the eye does not see it now, it will by-and-by? — as the 
ear does not hear it now, it will by-and-by ? Does it 
not mean that never shall eve see them, never ear hear 
them, and never heart conceive them; only the soul in 
its own conscious love will feel them now and forever ? 
Can God ever be seen ? The finite can never take in 
the infinite. He reveals now his face to us in the full- 
ness and glory of nature, and more fully in Jesus 
Christ. God himself in his infinity we can never see; 
the greatness of God's everlasting truth can never be 
wholly told to the ear; the wonders of eternity can 
never be wholly revealed to the heart ; but we can feel 
them and grasp them by taking the substance of them 
into our own interior life. This is the meaning of the 
eye not seeing, nor the ear hearing, nor the heart con- 
ceiving these things, and this is the profoundest truth in 
religion. We live by our faith, by our love, by our 
spiritual effort, by our communion. We have heaven 
now, God now — not by-and-by — present, instant, and 
constant. 

And see what an argument this is for the truth of 
the religion of Jesus, because it shows us how we 
truly live. We live by Jesus Christ now, because he 
fills up the highest faculties of our nature ; because he 
draws out our best affections ; because he gives to us 
the truth of our higher being. 

Let me ask you, my fellow-man, have you ever really 
lived? If you could only see with spiritual eyes, Broad- 
way would sometimes look like a grave-yard, living 



1QQ EXTEMPOE ANEOUS DISCOUKSES. 

men like tombs and sarcophagi in which souls are 
buried, affections lie dead, and the noblest powers 
of the soul are covered with cerements of worldliness 
and sensuality. To live really and truly, is to live in 
communion with God, with Christ, with goodness, 
with beauty. Do we really live, and what do we live 
by, every day, in sunshine and in sorrow ? That is a 
fine saying of Taylor's, when he speaks of certain who 
were " made of canvas that stormsails were made of." 
Yes, a man wants to be made of something that will 
stand storms as well as sunshine, that he may live in 
joy and in sorrow. 

People sometimes say, sneering at certain forms of 
faith, " It is good enough to live by, but it will not do 
to die by." Now, if it will not do to die by, then it is 
not fit to live by. If you know that your faith will do 
to live by, you may be sure it will do to die by. That 
is, if you live truly ; if you live only on the lower plane, 
it will not answer. If you live truly and faithfully, 
that which will do to live by will do to die by. And 
what is that? Have you that? have you that inward 
life ? Have you that which will do to live by now and 
forever. In joy and in sorrow, in life or in death, you 
should have that which will do to live by. You want 
it; you have got to live, to suffer; change and sorrow 
lie before you, and death comes. Are you ready with 
that which will do to live by under all conditions ? 

It will do to live by the spirit of Jesus Christ, and 
thankful ought we to be for every agency by which we 



LIFE IN CHRIST. - jq^ 

are brought into communion with. him. Sometimes 
the temptations of life will do that, for Jesus was 
tempted. "When the great struggle of sin takes place 
in us, if we can only catch his spirit, then we are 
brought into communion with him by temptation. 
And sometimes sorrow will do it, for Jesus sorrowed. 
When we weep as he wept over the grave of Lazarus, 
when we struggle as he struggled in the garden, then 
we may be brought into communion with him. And 
so by the simplest things, even as simple as these ele- 
ments of the broken bread and the shed wine, we may 
be brought into communion with him. Nothing is 
little or great only by the spirit which it unfolds ; and 
if the bread stands to us as a memorial of that self- 
sacrificing love, if the cup presents to us the symbol- 
ism of that poured out sacrifice for the world, then it 
is a great thing; and if we are brought into commu- 
nion with the spirit of Jesus Christ by it, let us glory 
and take hold of it. 

And here they stand to-day, and whom do I invite? 
Not the good, for they will come by the gravitation of 
their own nature and attraction of their own sympa- 
thy to Jesus Christ ; not the perfect, for there are none 
perfect. But I invite the tempted to come — -and who 
is not tempted? I invite the sorrowing to come — and 
who has not known sorrow? I invite the guilty to 
come, conscious of ^their sin and weakness, and feeling 
their need of this strength. I invite you all to come to 
the Lord's table, not mine — not to the table of my sect, 



IQg EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

but to the table of living, vital Christianity. I invite 
you to come here in this young spring season, when 
the forms of nature begin to yearn for the things by 
which they live. Oh, heart of man, with fathomless 
depths, look to Jesus Christ, and see what there is in 
him by which you live ! and in the truth of that sacred 
consideration I invite you all to come, eating of the 
bread and drinking of the cup, thus eating and drink- 
ing of Jesus Christ himself, and thus living now and 
forever in him. 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. 



See. saith "he, that thou mate all things according to the pattern 
showed to thee in the Mount, — Hebrews viii. 5. 

THE writer of this epistle refers here to the typical 
or illustrative character of the Jewish religion, as 
compared with the dispensation of Jesus. Between 
these two systems existed the relations of symbol and 
reality, of ideal and representative, of type and ante- 
type, as the law contained the pattern shown to Moses 
on Mount Sinai, when he was wrapped in the cloud, 
and in close communion with God, and, as such, a rela- 
tion existed between the pattern which he saw there, 
and the tabernacle and implements of the Levitical 
service, which were fashioned by it. In the present 
discourse I propose to employ, for a practical purpose, 
that fact of a relation between type and antetype, be- 
tween the ideal and the reality. My discourse will 
have two divisions. I shall consider, in the first place, 
the fact that all men have ideals — have some kind of 
spiritual conceptions — and in the second place, I shall 
urge the results of consistent action upon those concep- 
tions. 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

In the first place, then, I say that this relation sug- 
gested in the text is one which exists in human life and 
experience. There is a spiritual region in and above 
the nature of every man. where belong the primal 
patterns of things ; whence come the strongest inspira- 
tions, and which more or less completely casts the 
mold of our conduct and character. I do not know 
that we can lay hold of anything that more complete- 
ly distinguishes man from the animal, than this faculty 
of fashioning something after the inward pattern or 
conception; not acting from instinctive routine, bur 
from intelligent, inward, and original suggestion ; not 
primarily molded by circumstances, but working upon 
circumstances with the inward force of his thought, 
and proceeding, withal, in the orbit of a boundless 
development. 

Consider, for a moment, and you will see that this is 
the great characteristic of man — that he is the con- 
structor of things fashioned after an inward ideal or 
pattern, and thus he transforms the outward world 
according to his mental or spiritual conceptions. 
Here, on one part, stands vast, unshapen matter — rock, 
-wood, stream, fluent air ; on the other part is the 
human agent who is to work upon this world of mat- 
ter. You may say that the beaver or the bee works 
upon matter. The one proceeds with the utmost accu- 
racy to build its nest, and the other to construct its 
dam ; but there is a point at which each of them stops. 
They do not go a jot beyond the hue of instinct; they 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. ^11 

do nothing more "wonderful, nothing different from 
what has been done for six thousand years. But see, 
out of this same world of matter, man makes houses, 
weapons, ships, printing presses, steam engines and 
telegraphs. He makes implements, and produces 
combinations that did not exist in nature, but that 
stood first as shadows on the horizon of his own 
thought — patterns that were shown him in the mount 
of intellectual and spiritual elevation. Think for a 
moment of the great agents and engines of our civili- 
zation, and then think what shadowy ideas they all 
once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as 
swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial 
as the motions of the inventor's thought ; and in the 
noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sin- 
ews of the printing press, whose thunder shakes the 
world. 

Before man, the thinker, on the mount of ideal con- 
ception, the great agents of civilization have passed in 
a prefiguring procession — a shadowy line of kings, 
bearing the symbols of a sovereignty that should, in 
due time, be transmitted into his hands, to become the 
mighty instruments of his dominion over land and sea. 

But if this power which man has of working from 
inward conceptions is expressed in the ways in which 
he pours his thought into matter, it is still more ap- 
parent in the ways in which his thought, so to speak, 
overrides matter — as he appears not merely in inven- 
tions, but in creations. The work of art, for instance 



112 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 



— the great work of genius — whence comes that? 
Something that you clo not see in nature, something 
that can not be interpreted as a mere combination of 
matter — a mere putting together of the elements of 
the physical world ; but something that has flowed out 
of the ideal springs of a man's own soul, until we 
have the splendors of the sunset sky woven in the 
fibers of the canvas, and the stones of the quarry 
heaved up in an architectural anthem of grandeur and 
aspiration. 

I repeat, then, it is the great peculiarity of man that 
he is a builder, a fashioner after an inward pattern, 
molding and transforming the outward world into the 
shape of that pattern. But that which characterizes 
man, generally characterizes men specifically. Each 
individual man is endeavoring to realize some ideal, is 
trying to make some shadowy conception substantial. 
Perhaps he is not conscious of this — very likely he is 
not. He may not see any vivid connection between the 
type that is in his mind and his daily conduct ; but if 
you will reflect for a moment, you will see that the 
very condition of our endeavor is desire, which is 
something that exists now only as a mental concep- 
tion. Even the basest, the grossest man, is incited in 
this manner. He has his pattern, gross and vile as it 
may be, which he is trying to realize. The tides of 
billowy life that heave through a hundred streets, are 
moved by unseen ideal attractions. 

But the main conclusion to which I would lead your 



THE PATTEEN IN THE MOUNT. ^3 

thought is this : that almost every man has concep- 
tions higher and better than he realizes, or than he 
even endeavors to make real. The ideal of wealth, of 
pleasure, of splendid fame that he seeks, is often a 
pattern that is shown to him, and he tries to fashion 
his circumstances to it. And here what a power 
there is — what a secret spring — to move man! "What 
would man do without the ideal motive before him 
to lead him on? If you look at men in the street, 
what are they, after all, but as mere figures, moved 
by unseen power hither and thither? It is only by 
seeing the ideal from which they act, that you get at 
the spring which moves them. But I say in the minds 
of most men, in those especially brought up under the 
influence of Christian culture, there is a higher and 
better ideal than these ordinary worldly ones ; nay, in 
the mind of every man I believe there is such an ideal. 
To come at once to the point, almost every man — yes, 
I will say every man — has some ideal of religion, of 
moral excellence, of spiritual attainment. Before 
every man there hovers a high conception — or one 
more or less high — certainly above the level of his 
present conduct — of virtue, of moral action, of duty, 
of righteousness, of truth ; and the more he looks at 
that, the more vivid it becomes to him. Although he 
may, at the same time, not move a jot or a hair to- 
ward it, nor even endeavor, for a single instant, to 
come up to it, yet it stands before him, and he sees it 
clear and bright, kindling upon his thought, and ready 



1^4 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

to move his heart. And you see this fact revealed in 
this remarkable manner by every man. If he does ever 
so bad an act, he tries to justify it in some way — tries 
to reconcile it to some ideal of virtue. There is no 
man so hardened that he does not have an apology for 
the wrong he does, however atrocious it may be. 'No 
matter if it be something that violates all the sancti- 
ties of society, that jars upon every man's heart; he 
endeavors to show that there was a good motive at the 
bottom of it, and it was not done from a motive utter- 
ly evil and corrupt. So that from his own showing, 
his own confession, there is an ideal standard in his 
mind higher than that from which he has acted. It is 
a great thing, this attempt of man to justify his con- 
duct, for it is a universal tribute to a law above the 
soul of man, guiding his conscience ; it is a proclama- 
tion everywhere, that human nature is such that it is 
not limited and confined by mere sensual, material 
ideals, but that it acknowledges and sees a higher 
spiritual plane. 

There are times, then, I say, when even the worst 
man is caught up into a mount of higher conception, 
and has a pattern better than his own life set before 
him ; but he does not always see that pattern, or, if 
he does, he does not diligently work after it. What 
better advice, then, what better exhortation could be 
given to any man than just this? "Work out your 
highest conceptions — the noblest standard of truth and 
duty that comes to you. It may not be the highest 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. ^15 

possible, nor the highest conceivable by other men, 
but that which seems to you the highest possible or 
conceivable, work up to, and live up to, and endeavor 
to make it the rule. Why, of the most debased, most 
hardened, surely we can say, they have some better 
thought than what appears in their present life. 
Surely, oh, prodigal, among the husks and swine, you 
are not entirely transformed and assimilated to the 
things among which you live ; you are not yourself 
all husk and swine. Oh, vile, polluted man ! there is 
something better in your thought than that w^hich ap- 
pears in your life — something nobler on the horizon of 
your soul than that which you have symbolized and 
represented in your action. 

And so especially it is in regard to the matter of 
faith about which many are much troubled and per- 
plexed. They say they can not believe that the Bible 
is divinely inspired; they are not fully convinced 
about the immortality of the soul, and they even some- 
times incline to doubt the existence of a God. What 
then are you to do, my fellow-men ? To throw aside 
all faith and live outside of its circle, merely as an 
animal, in a coarse, material existence ? No — no ; 
some shred of faith you have. Every man has some. 
Some conceptions of spiritual things dawn upon every 
mind ; live up to the faith you have. Have you a faith 
that it is good to do good ? Live up to that. Have 
you faith that charity is a blessed thing ? Live up to 
that. Work out to the extreme limit of your concep- 



EXTEMPOE ANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

tion here, and just so sure as you do it, the wider will 
your circle open before you. That is the best way to 
get over intellectual and spiritual difficulties ; take the 
solid ground on which you stand, and make that a 
platform of action. Do not, because you can not see 
all things, act in nothing. If you can not believe in 
the truths that come to you in Christ Jesus, take what 
truth you can believe. If you do not believe the 
Bible, I am sorry for you. I do not see why you do 
not believe it, with its grand application to your spir- 
itual necessity, its trumpet appeals, its warning and in- 
struction, its glorious character of Jesus Christ as the 
ideal; but if you do not believe it, work up that which 
you do believe. There is something, I repeat, higher 
and better, hovering over every life, and as to that, I 
apply the words of the text, "Make all things accord- 
ing to the pattern showed to thee in the mount." 

In the next place, let us proceed to see what will re- 
sult if a man actually attempts thus to work up to his 
highest and best spiritual conceptions- In the first 
place, I think he will acquire some comprehension of 
the worth and certainty of spiritual being, and of the 
reality of his own soul. Let a man think, when he en- 
deavors to carry out the best conception of duty, how 
much that is all-controlling and supreme in his life, let 
him think that the highest claim in his life is from 
within; let him think how mind will after all control 
and master the body. For, as I said in the commence- 
ment, in the coarsest endeavor, in the basest action of 



THE PATTEEN IN THE MOUNT. 

a man's life, it is his inward desire that moves him. It 
is not the mere object itself; there must exist in him a 
desire, a yearning for that object, or he makes no en- 
deavor to attain it. Let him think, then, how the 
springs of his action are spiritual, are inward, existing 
in the desires of his soul. And allow me to ask, 
"What is this spiritual or conscious power within him? 
Is it possible that matter is everything? Is it possible 
that man, controlled by this inward desire, moving for- 
ward to some ideal, is nothing more than the block, the 
stone, the metal upon which he works ? Is it possible 
that man, who has been led forward from age to age, 
through a splendid succession of achievements, until 
he has transformed this material world, and made it an 
instrument of power, strung the lightning and made it 
work for him, rode on wheels of thunder with banners 
of flame — is it possible that man, working upward 
from this ideal, is simply a clod upon the earth ? The 
moment you think of this power to control and master 
material things, you fall back upon the consciousness 
that you have a soul, and that there is more evidence 
than you have supposed of its existence. In fact, there 
is more proof of a soul than of a body. When a man 
asks me what proof I have of a soul, I reply by asking 
him, What proof have you of a body? You have 
more logical difficulty to prove an outward world than 
a soul. Spiritual consciousness, mounting aspiration, 
ideal influences have controlled you all through life. 
But more than this; not only will a man, as he 



118 



EXTEMPOKANEOUS PISCOUKSES. 



begins to work from his best spiritual conceptions up- 
ward, begin to comprehend the worth of spiritual 
things and of the soul, but he will begin to acquire 
right standards of action. I hardly need say that 
in the calculations of men, very generally they do not 
start from the ground of the soul. If you look at a 
great many of the social fallacies of our time, at a 
great many of the social faults and errors of men in 
business, in politics, and in life generally, you will 
find that the fallacy or error consists in the fact that 
they do not start from the ground of the soul as a 
standard, but from outward things. They estimate all 
outward things by their bulk or glitter. It is strange 
to see how, in the midst of civilization, we are guilty 
of the grossest Fetish worship, like the African or 
rude barbarian. Instead of worshiping the true 
spiritual ideal, we bow down before the gross idols of 
fashion, wealth, and power; so that a man is carried 
along in the great maelstrom, with his individual con- 
victions and consciousness subservient to the opinions 
of the mass. One thing we greatly need, and that is, 
more individuality. Man needs to fall back into his 
own personal consciousness, to rely upon his own spir- 
itual convictions, instead of being taken off his feet 
and carried into the crowd, and made to worship ex- 
ternal and material things. Much of our civilization 
that we glorify is nothing more than a worship of mat- 
ter, rather than an estimate from the highest ground — 
from a spiritual standard. 



THE PATTEKN IN THE MOUNT. ^9 

The great fault of man's reasoning is not in tlie 
process, but in the premises. We say of a man, that 
he can not reason well because he is wrong in his pro- 
cess. That is not the fault ; his mistake consists in his 
not starting well — in his premises, rather than his pro- 
cess. The knave reasons as well as the saint, but he 
does not start from the same premises. The insane 
man often reasons most acutely, most wonderfully. 
If you get into the stream of his logic, he trips you up. 
So sharp, so subtile is he, and so ready to meet your 
objections, that you have to go back to the false prem- 
ises and conceptions in the chink and crannies of his 
brain, which weaken it, and make it morbid. Start- 
ing from these he makes the mistake. The sane man 
differs from the insane man, not in the process, but in 
the premises. And so it is with regard to the reason- 
ing of men generally. They start from false premises, 
and reasoning from them, at last come to the conclu- 
sion that anything they do is right. If they once can 
make themselves believe that it is right to uphold a 
certain traffic, then it is easy to come to the conclusion 
that anything by which they sustain it is right. If 
they believe they have a right to consult expediency, 
then it is but another step to believe in the right to 
pick a national pocket just as much as a private 
pocket — to steal an island as much as to commit a 
trespass upon private property. Start with wrong 
premises, and all manner of conclusions will follow. 

So it is sometimes with men in trade — sometimes, 



120 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

not always. They keep on studying a set of valuable 
results, which, consciously or unconsciously, they 
adopt as part of their creed. They start not from the 
ground of the ten commandments, but of cotton bales 
and sugar hogsheads — of quick returns and large profits. 
They do not care much about any grand plan of life, 
unless there are plenty of coupons at the margin. 

This, then, is the great fault with men ; they start 
with the premises of worldly gain and worldly good. 
I do not say that a man always sits down and says that 
that is his end; but that is really or virtually his end. 

There is one evil in our society that may come from 
extensive reading of the savings and doings of very 
good men. TVe have had, during the past week, an 
eloquent discourse upon the life of Franklin. Now 
Franklin was a man who did not live by mere expe- 
diency, especially during the latter part of his life. 
He did not care for his own sordid interest in the sacri- 
fices he made in the Revolution. But a good many 
have taken his maxims of worldly prudence and made 
them their Bible, almost ; and by a too rigid adhe- 
rence to them they have run into a system of mere 
worldly expediency — into an idea that nothing that 
thwarts gain, hinders profit, damages worldly good, 
is to stand in their way ; and, with that premise, all 
kinds of conclusions, all kinds of results may come. 

And so it is in politics. Men start, not from the 
platform of ideal and spiritual realities, but from parry. 
It is the Buffalo or the Baltimore platform, and not 



THE PATTEEN IN THE MOUNT. 

that of Mount Sinai or the Mount of Olives. And so, 
in countless instances in life, men rear up from false 
premises, build up from the outside, stretch out hori- 
zontally, not vertically. They are not architects of the 
ideal within ; they do not start from the ground of the 
soul. Let a man take up the subject of immortality 
— of the spirit of man enshrined in time, and -working 
through sense, as destined to live beyond the stars, 
when banks and warehouses, cities and continents, 
shall have melted with fervent heat, and crumbled to 
ashes ; when this world shall be clashed from its orbit 
as a speck of dust from a flying wheel — let him take 
the grand calculus of the immortality of the soul, and 
start with that, and then worldly good and gain will 
take their proper attitude, temporary expediency will 
sink down, and right will assert its proper place ; then 
he will have a true standard by which to estimate all 
things. 

In the next place, if a man really endeavors to work 
according to his highest and best inward conception, 
he will come to perceive the need of Christ and the 
worth of Christianity. For let any man, as I have 
suggested, work from a spiritual conception, however 
low, however narrow, and he will be sure to arrive at 
a conception a little higher and broader, and from that 
to one still more high, and so on. This is a law every- 
where. The moment a man gets a taste of knowledge, 
if there is any love of it in him, he wants more, and 
the more he knows, the more he wishes to know. He 

6 



122 EXTEMP0BANE0US DISC0UBSES. 

feels his ignorance, and his aspirations are higher. 
That is what distinguishes the scholar from a man who 
gets what is popularly termed an education. A man 
goes to school five or six years, and then he is all var- 
nished and polished, ready to be put into a shop ; but 
the scholar never knows enough; he is always aspiring 
for something more. ~New facts burst upon him ; that 
which he has attained is but a key to the boundless 
treasure of truth. 

So in regard to art. Let a man for the first time look 
at paintings, and he hardly knows a good one from a 
poor one. He has no standard of discrimination. But 
when he becomes familiar with works of art, he ac- 
quires a taste by which he can judge of the merits of 
any work that is presented to him. 

And so it is in music. It is by experience practically 
put forth in one degree, that we gain the power to 
work in a higher degree. 

And so in regard to spiritual action. As soon as a 
man works up to his best and highest ideal, just so 
soon a new ideal will burst upon him. Working from 
his best and highest, he gains a better and a higher 
still, until at length he will come to feel that spiritual 
aspirations are boundless. And when, from the yearn- 
ings of his educated soul, he wants a perfect ideal, he 
will ask, "Where is the excellence that will answer my 
highest ideal? where is that which will begin to fill 
up this boundless thirst of the soul, which has only 
been increased by drinking from narrow cisterns ? 



THE PATTEEN IN THE MOUNT. ^23 

And J esus Christ comes out upon the horizon of history, 
and stands before him in the Gospel, and answers that 
inquiry. He says virtually to man, "I am the ideal for 
which you aspire ; in me behold a perfect reflection of 
that which you now must seek; in me behold that which 
continually fills up your yearning want, and makes 
that want the deeper, that it may fill it with more." 
Here stands man on one side, with a sense of imper- 
fection and sin, asking, What is there that will help me 
in, what is there that will deliver me from the power 
of sin? No mere man, no mere teacher, like Plato or 
Seneca, can do it. Man needs some spirit of divine 
goodness to enter into him, to cure him of his sin, and 
Jesus Christ embodies that divine spirit. He comes 
before man to assure him of mercy, with the encourage- 
ment that the vilest sin may be cast off, and that man 
may throw himself upon the divine mercy which he 
represents, and be lightened of his load. 

And here, on the other hand, are limitless wants 
and desires; and how does Jesus Christ gratify them? 
By exhibiting a perfect Father; by showing an ideal 
to us that we never can compass, but can always aspire 
to. That is the only thing that can answer the aspira- 
tions of man's nature — a perfect excellence that man 
can never reach, but toward which he can ever be 
moving. 

" Oh," says the weary worker who drops his chisel 
before the marble, "I can imitate the natural object, 
but it does not answer my ideal; I want to achieve 



^24 EXTEHP0EANE0US DISCOUESES. 

sometliing better and nobler, and I can do it." " Oh," 
says the poet, "I can sing a still sweeter song." 
"Oh," says the philosopher, "there are more boundless 
depths of thought down which I can drop the plummet 
of my searching intellect," There must be something 
beyond man in this world. Even on attaining to his 
highest possibilities, he is like a bird beating against 
his cage. There is something beyond. Oh, deathless 
soul, like a sea-shell, moaning for the bosom of the 
ocean to which you belong ! Tell me not of a limita- 
tion, says the weary, broken heart, over the grave of 
its hopes. Tell me not that this world is all, says the 
bereaved mother. Tell me not that death is an eternal 
sleep, says feeble and broken humanity. And feeling 
this great need of the soul, we cling to the cross and to 
faith in immortality. 

I repeat, commencing with our lowest spiritual ideal, 
and working upward, we reach that state of thought, 
that aspiration, that desire which Christ alone can satisfy, 
and which he does satisfy. And a great proof of Chris- 
tianity is this : that we work upward from our best 
spiritual conceptions, and come to this great spiritual 
antetype at last. The man who lives most truly accord- 
ing to his spiritual wants and capacities, who unfolds 
most sincerely and constantly his best ideal, comes to 
the conclusion that Christ and Christianity are the 
greatest blessings that God has given to the world ; 
that they alone can satisfy, and that they alone will 
answer that ideal. 



THE PATTERN IN THE MOUNT. ^95 

Many at the present day are afraid of science and 
philosophy. The other day there came out in one of 
our most scientific journals a statement of some recent 
discoveries in Egypt, in which one important fact was 
left out, namely, that from the most accurate compu- 
tations that could be made, it is supposed that men 
existed in Egypt eleven thousand years ago. This 
discovery was based upon the fact of works of pottery 
being found at a considerable depth below the surface 
of the earth, the superstratum having been deposited 
only at the rate of three and a half inches in a cen- 
tury. That was thought to damage revelation. Dam- 
age revelation! You might just as well suppose that 
a man could damage the throne of the Almighty, as to 
damage the essential truth of revelation. What dif- 
ference does it make whether this world is six thou- 
sand or six million years old, to the wounded spirit 
that feels the balm of Christ's comfort ? to the tempest- 
tossed soul that Christ has lifted up? to the spiritual 
experience that sees in God its highest ideal, and 
mounts upward continually? There is no more con- 
nection between the two things than there is between 
duty and a stone, between goodness and a tree, be- 
tween a thing utterly spiritual and utterly material. 
Science does its work — its great and noble work — on 
one plane of action, and revelation on another. 

TVTiat is the object of revelation? It is to lead man 
to God ; to show him the Father ; to bring his spirit 
into conscious communion through Jesus Christ ; to 



126 EXTEMP0EANE0U3 DISCOUESES. 

deliver him from his sins, and comfort him in his sor- 
row. Oh, geologist, chip away with your hammer to 
the end of time; yon can not strike away one grain 
of the truth in Jesus Christ, as it comes to my soul. 
Oh, ethnologist, trace back the history of man as far 
as you can ; you can not seal up this spiritual want of 
mine, which Christ satisfies. Each thing to its proper 
domain : science to interpret material things, to un- 
lock the bonds of nature ; Christianity to comfort the 
soul, and lift it up. But if there does come a collision 
between the two — which I conceive impossible — of 
what have you the strongest evidence : that the world 
is six millions of years old, or that Jesus Christ com- 
forts you in sorrow, lifts you up when you are bowed 
down, and brings you to an ideal that answers your 
wants and aspirations i The soul's evidence is the 
highest, and must be heard. Let Xewton and Le 
Terrier unfold the starry heavens, and let us hear the 
music of the spheres, but at the same time the soul 
stands up and says. "I, too, am a reality; I know that 
I have a Father, for I have felt him ; I know that I 
have a Saviour, for he has lifted me up. and blessed 
me. Science is doubtless true ; but if it is not. I 
know that I am. for I know that I feel. I strive, there- 
fore, to work after a pattern that is older than time 
and sense — a spiritual ideal that has been shown me in 
the mount of spiritual elevation and faith." 

And, lastly, let me say this : that if any man en- 
deavors to realize his highest — his best spiritual coti- 



THE PATTEEN IN THE MOUNT. 

ceptions — he will be successful only by earnest effort. 
I have shown that, working upward from our best 
spiritual realities, we will come to something better 
and higher — we will come to a conviction of spiritual 
realities, and of the essential truth of Christ Jesus. 
Now, in order to do this, we must work earnestly, and 
put forth earnest effort. There are no great interests 
achieved, or works done, in this world, except by 
earnestness. "Why should not a man be as enthusiastic 
in regard to religion, and the great interests of the 
soul, as in regard to worldly affairs? There is a great 
difference between enthusiasm and fanaticism. They 
are the antipodes of each other. There never was a 
man who did a great thing in the world without en- 
thusiasm. ~No man ever made a fortune without it. 
Was there ever an artist who was not enthusiastic in 
his art? So in regard to matters of religion — -of ful- 
filling the spiritual ideal — we must be enthusiastic. 
If a man is going really to live up to his best concep- 
tions of God, truth, and duty, according to the pattern 
shown him in the mount, everything else must stand 
subservient to that, and he must be enthusiastic about 
it. How gloriously this enthusiasm breaks out in 
other things — in patriotism, for instance, as was exem- 
plified in the maid of Saragossa, as she stood up by 
the gun, bespattered with blood; in John Hancock, 
who, when the council met in Boston, in the stormy 
days of the Eevolution, and talked of letting the 
British into the city, though he owned probably more 



128 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

property that any other man in Boston, said, " Burn 
Boston, and make John Hancock a beggar, if the 
public good requires it." We like to hear such 
things; but why don't men say, " Burn the richest 
treasure I have got, if it corrupts my soul. Burn 
down the pinnacles of my pride — my wordly interest 
— if they stand in the way of my attainment and ful- 
fillment of the great pattern which has been shown me 
in the mount ?" 

We do not like fanaticism in anything; but if we 
must have it at all, let us have the fanaticism of relig- 
ion rather than that of worldliness. For the most 
fanatical man of the two is he that buries his soul up 
in bullion, grovels in the earth, and lives like a bar- 
nacle on this planet, without recognizing anything 
higher or better. I would rather see a fanatic in relig- 
ion than in worldliness. That old fanatic, Simeon, 
who founded a sect called " Pillar Saints," who stood 
ten years on the top of a pillar in sun and storm, 
drenched and dried, weather-beaten and baked, who 
lived and died there, was at least so much nearer 
heaven than the fanatic who was groping below. 

But there is no need of fanaticism in order to fulfill 
the noblest ideal. It is not by going out of our rela- 
tions, but by diligent action in our relations to busi- 
ness, truth, and social action, everywhere, no matter 
where it may be, if it is lawful, that you can fulfill the 
ideal of spiritual good that comes to you in Jesus 
Christ, Only be in earnest— be enthusiastic about it. 



THE PATTEEN IN THE MOUNT. ^29 

Oh, my friend, you have, as I remarked in the com- 
mencement, some ideal higher than that which you 
act upon; you are lifted up to something that is above 
the common plane of your life. What is the signifi- 
cance of material things? It is in the impression they 
leave upon the mind — the elements they transfer to 
our consciousness. Therefore, if on standing on a 
mountain I get an idea of something lofty and glori- 
ous, the impression is maintained. Suppose, now, 
that I am lifted up on the mount of prayer or medita- 
tion, and I get an idea of something elevated and 
glorious, am I not just as much on the mountain, to 
all intents and purposes, as on the Mount of Olives or 
Sinai? Oh, man, there are some duties hovering be- 
fore you which you know you have not fulfilled — 
some great claim you have not completely answered. 
It may be you have recognized the ideal in Christ 
Jesus, and feel that that is what you should aspire 
after with earnest effort. I repeat, then, what is the 
thing that stands higher to you than the present plane 
of your life? Aspire to it. There is no more earnest 
voice than that which comes to you to-day, speaking 
of that which is higher than that which you now do — 
nobler than that which you have cherished, and saying 
to you, " Go forth ; make all things after the pattern 
shown to thee in the mount." 

6* 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIRATIONS, 



From -the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is 
overwhelmed ; leadme to the rock that is higherthanl. — Psalmlxi. 2. 



HIS is the language of an earnest spirit, conscious 



JL of need, and by a strong figure of speech express- 
ing its conviction of the existence of a help outside, 
and greater than itself. How wonderfully fresh and 
applicable the Book of Psalms is ! What a reservoir 
of human experience ! what a perpetual spring-tide of 
human sympathies! It has some form of speech for 
every devout need of the soul. It is a great organ of 
religious utterance, pealing forth in that grand old 
Hebrew age, from every valve and stop of emotion 
that the human spirit has felt, or will feel, until time 
shall be no more. The cry of anguish, the burst of 
praise, the wail of penitence, the prayer of need, the 
expression of trust, the sacred admiration that sweeps 
the starry heavens, the contrite introspection con- 
centrated upon the sin-sick soul — all these find lan- 
guage there. The strings of David's harp are the 
chords of the universal heart. Doubtless, my friends, 
you and I, as well as thousands besides, have seen the 




^32 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

time when the words of the text were just the words 
we wanted to rise ; when, conscious of weakness, of 
need, of the pressure of temptation, of sorrow, of ad- 
verse forces, in darkness, in some great storm of 
calamity beating upon us, or some heat of this world's 
glare too strong for us, we could have cried from the 
bottom of the heart, " Lead me to the rock that is 
higher than I." 

But I wish especially to say of the language of the 
text just now, that it is peculiarly the expression of re- 
ligion. It springs out of religious emotions, and jus- 
tifies religious conceptions. It gives us the idea that 
there is such a thing as religion apart from anything 
like enlightened intelligence, or mere moral punctil- 
iousness or correctness of conduct. There is such an- 
element as religion, and the language of the text is 
peculiarly the language of that element. In other 
words, I take the text as the basis of a few remarks de- 
signed to show the specialty and . necessity of religion, 
apart from anything else that, in our minds, we may 
associate with it. 

To illustrate what I mean more distinctly, I remark, 
in the first place, that this is the expression of faith, as 
distinoriislied from science, and it justifies that faith. 
The present age is not, I think, to be characterized 
above all others as an age of intellect, as some might 
suppose. At least it is not peculiarly the age of great 
intellects. If anything, I should say it was otherwise. 
In all ages of the world there have been men equal, if 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIRATIONS. ^33 

not superior in caliber to any of the present time — equal, 
if not superior in depth, real power, and substance of 
intellect. It is rather an a^e of diffused knowledge ; an 
age in which there are more cultivated intellects than 
ever before; and this march of intellect of which we 
hear so much spoken, consists, I suppose, in bringing 
the rear ranks of humanity into the front, rather than in 
displaying any great generalship of intellect, Nor is it 
an age of fresh, vigorous, original intellect peculiarly ; 
because in our time, with all this diffused knowledge, 
there also is a diffused imitation; there is a conformity 
of thought yery prevalent among men. Men think 
very much alike — in platoons, in sects, in parties. It- 
is not a time when there is great, fresh, original think- 
ing, such as there was in the days of the Reformation, 
and such as there has been in other times when great 
religious or political questions haye pressed upon every 
heart. In such times, even men with small intellectual 
capacity have been kindled and fired with zeal, and 
become powerful ; for it is a characteristic of human na- 
ture, that sometimes a man of much less substance of 
intellect than another is more powerful, because he is 
more in earnest. There have been times of more 
earnest thought than at the present, and I repeat that 
I should not characterize our times as an age of intel- 
lect, but rather as an age of science. It is an age of 
vast knowledge, so far as the material world is con- 
cerned. It is an age of wonderful control over the 
forces and facts of nature. 



134 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

By this knowledge, certainly, man lias great power, 
as lie has by all intellectual acquisition. Intellectual 
strength is a wondrous faculty. In yonder closet there 
sits a pale thinker, in body puny almost as an infant, 
shrinking from the cold, and withering under the heat 
like a sensitive plant. And yet upon some occasion 
that man will stand up, and his words will run like an 
electric shock through the hearts of thousands, and 
they will be swayed by the sheer force of his mind like 
the leaves of the summer forest. He sets his pen to 
the vindication of some truth, and his documents flying 
abroad, alarm councils, change faiths, and alter polities. 

Intellectual power is a wonderful attribute of man. 
I stand looking at an eclipse of the sun or of the 
moon. There are two things that always especially 
excite my admiration. First, there is the regularity 
of those great laws by which the heavenlv bodies move 
in their appointed path, by which every planet comes 
to its proper place in due time. In the second place, 
there is the wonderful accuracy of science, which has 
so detected those laws that it can prophesy their ful- 
fillment from age to age, and can foretell the precise 
instant, centuries ahead, when the moon's edge shall 
touch and sail across the disc of the sun. But yet, 
with all this power and glory of science, it can not do 
everything for man that he needs. It does not cor- 
respond to his entire nature ; it does not represent all 
the elements that are in him. ^lan feels that unless 
there is something else to be ministered to him than 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIKATIONS. ^35 

mere truth, which comes in a scientific form, he is help- 
less and needy, and is justified in looking around him 
for something more ; because there is no faculty of our 
nature that has not, or ought not to have, its needed 
supply. We know it is so with the bodily system, 
with the whole material organism with which we are 
connected. The lungs are fitted for air, the eyes for 
light, and all outward adjustments appear in due order, 
adapted to the cravings and needs of the bodily organ- 
ism. The intellect has scientific truth that excites it, 
and leads it to explore, and achieve its great victories. 
So there are exquisite affections in man that are with- 
out supply, unless there is some other resource than that 
which comes through the medium of science. Xow 
man can not live and die, can not meet all the occa- 
sions, and bear up among all the vicissitudes of life, 
merely by science, merely by what the understanding 
grasps, and the intellect systematizes and makes plain. 
It is possible you may find a few rare instances of men 
who can make out what is called a scientific religion, 
and live by it ; having a cause for every effect, and a 
law for every crisis ; finding the source of their own 
suffering at the end of the scalpel, and counting up 
their beating* pulses by the tick of the watch. But 
there are few people who can stand on the level of the 
mere facts of nature and say it is enough to know 
that the earth turns on its axis, and that all things 
move in order. 

My friends, we want something higher than all this 



136 EXT^MPOEANEOTJS DI3COUESE9. 

— something that is not merely on the level of our 
intellectual comprehension. We want something be- 
side these forces of nature. They have no particular 
sympathy with us. They are relentless, silent, stern. 
They move on in a terrible but splendid order. We 
crave something akin to ourselves — something near to 
our own souls, as nature is not — something that is 
higher than ourselves, to lift us up. It must be above 
the facts that prevail around us. 

If you look at this point, if you take a survey of 
the needs and conditions of men, you will find that 
what science supplies is not sufficient. With the 
achievements of science, we pile up splendid trophies 
about us; but still I am inclined to think that, after 
all, they give to our age a kind of hard, materialistic 
aspect. We lack something which other ages have 
had ; for human history is strangely like human de- 
velopment. There is such a thing as tracing out anal- 
ogy too far ; but just as you find individuals eminent 
in one kind of excellence and lacking in another, so 
you will find ages prominent in one thing and defi- 
cient in another; and just as you find individuals 
bringing their contributions to human knowledge, so 
you will find ages, as it were, bringing their contribu- 
tions to the millennial period. So we turn with a kind 
of yearning and longing back to the age of faith, as dis- 
tinguished from our age of science ; and while we see 
a great deal of superstition, while we recognize much 
mental slavery, and many things that we would not 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIRATIONS. Jg^ 

transport into our own time, we discover some elements 
in it that we like — something in the unworldly heart 
that built the grand cathedrals, and painted the glori- 
ous pictures of the past — something in the wide-spread 
reverence — something in the saintly forms of love and 
devotion, which we feel is needed to temper our too 
adamantine intellect, our too materialistic atmosphere. 
Therefore, we say, what comes through science does not 
make up the complement and perfection of human na- 
ture. TTe need an element of faith — that kind of faith 
with which this grand old Psalm was written. The soul 
wants something more than what the mere intellect 
gives ; something that can reach the depths of its affec- 
tions, and strengthen it in its moral weakness. 

Positive knowledge, after all, what a little way it 
goes in the formation of life and character — what a 
little way in supplying the deeper wants of the heart ! 
You know a fact — you know ten thousand facts ; what 
then ? Do you realize the essence of a single fact ? 
Do you bring a practical account of that fact to bear 
upon your heart and life ? Why, some of the greatest 
knowers in the world have sat amid it all as unmoved 
and untouched by the grand truths which appeal to 
them, as though they were marble. Laplace sees the 
whole solar system unraveled before him, traces the 
minutest fiber, follows out the grandest deductions, 
and yet finds no God in the universe at all. The 
anatomist opens the human system, and rends that 
wondrous handwriting in the flesh, and yet sees no 



238 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

religion there. His intellect is blunted to that. It 
is one thing to see a fact intellectually, and another 
to get at the essence of that fact. And how do we 
get at the essence of any truth except by faith — by 
faith in the invisible vailed in the visible? God is de- 
clared, not by open revelation, but by the things he 
has made ; and unless man has faculties by which he 
comprehends that declaration, it is all cold, dead athe- 
istic matter to him, after all. The essence of the fact, 
the spirit that moves within the wheels — how are we 
to apprehend these? How do you apprehend any 
great spiritual fact about you — such, for instance, as 
the love of your father or mother, or those dearest to 
you ? Not by what you can see, not by any outward 
form or lineament, but by what you believe of the in- 
ward spirit and principle. And so in the universe at 
large, unless something more than the mere scientific in- 
tellect which grasps the fact is present ; unless there is 
faith to apprehend and take hold of the spiritual reality, 
we get nothing but the dead, atheistic form of things. 

And when positive knowledge fails, we want this 
trust in something higher. When the sky is obscured, 
the chart torn, the compass lost, man raises to his eye 
the glass of faith, and sees through the mist the 
thread of love quivering down from the eternal orb 
and drawing him on. "We need something higher 
than science. TTe need that faith which lifts us up to 
a close realizing sense of communion with God who is 
behind the facts of nature. 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIRATIONS. ^39 

But I observe, in the second place, that the language 
of the text is the language of religion as distinguished 
from moralitv. We have seen that it is the language 
of religion as distinguished from science ; I say it is 
the language of religion as distinguished from moral- 
ity. Now every good man — every man that is trying 
to accomplish a true ideal of life — finds two truths, two 
sentiments, two tendencies, working in his mind and 
his heart, and he can not get rid of them, let him do 
what he may. There is no amount of logic can drive 
them out, There on the one hand is the sovereignty 
of God, the supreme control, the foreorclination of 
God Almighty; that is one truth that no reasoning 
man can push out of his mind. Supposing that God 
is perfect in all his attributes; he must have fore- 
known and foreordained all things, and he must con- 
trol in the grand result. You can not put your logic 
into any shape by which you can get rid of that con- 
clusion, if you admit the infinity of God. But, on the 
other hand, there speaks to us something that I may 
with all reverence say is nearer to us even than this 
f ac t — our own consciousness. There is a voice within 
us which assures us that we are free to act in a certain 
direction, and that we have a terrible responsibility 
given to us of choosing between right and wrong, be- 
tween good and evil. TTe are assured we have it, be- 
cause we feel a sense of blame always following our 
wron^-doino:. Wherever von follow man, no matter 
what may be his physical form, his religion, his creed, 



140 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

his degree of intellectual elevation, if lie is sound- 
minded yon find in him a sense of blame. All over 
the world there is found this accusation of a moral law 
within him, that is predicated on and justified only by 
the conviction that he could have done right when he 
did wrong. Therefore, just as sure as the sovereignty 
of God on the one hand rests on our reason, so on the 
other hand does onr sense of moral freedom rest on our 
consciousness. These are two facts that every earnest 
man meets in the great problem of his moral and spir- 
itual life. 

Now, out of the first of these — the fact of God's 
sovereignty — grows the sentiment of dependence. 
That is peculiarly a religious sentiment. And out of 
the other fact — the consciousness of moral freedom — 
grows the sentiment of moral responsibility ; a feeling 
that we have some obligation laid upon us — something 
that we ought to do — something that we are not to 
shift upon the shoulders of another, but that we our- 
selves must perform. Now I say that the tendency of 
the one fact is to excite a disposition especially relig- 
ious, and of the other especially moral. The grand 
religious emotions grow out of the doctrine of God's 
sovereignty. You see them piled up mountain high 
in the old Hebrew Bible, as expressed in the senti- 
ment that God rules all things according to the coun- 
sel of his own will ; does what he will in the armies of 
heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth ; says 
to the waves of the sea, Thus far shalt thou come, 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIKATIONS. 

and no farther. This is the grand fact that the He- 
brew Testament embodies— a sense of God's overruling 
sovereignty. 

And it is a remarkable fact — you maj explain it as 
you can — that the most energetic, the most powerful, 
the most active me^ have been those who have believ- 
ed in the sovereignty of God. One would naturally 
infer that if a man believes that God overrules and 
ordains all things, he would be disposed to sit down in 
a kind of blank fatalism, just as the Orientals have done, 
and have no strength to move — that it would cool his 
native ardor. But the most energetic men have been 
those who have thrown themselves back on a sense of 
the sovereignty of God. Cromwell's Ironsides, who 
were never defeated, every man of them, I suppose, be- 
lieved in the old Calvinistic doctrine of election and 
foreordination. Now, I dislike Calvinism in its essence, 
perhaps, as much as anybody, but I must give it this 
tribute : that this element of a consistent, firm faith in 
God's divine sovereignty has been one of its prominent 
powers, and in some respects one of its peculiar won- 
ders. It is really an abnegation of the individual and 
a substitution of the sense of God working through 
the individual. Man himself is nothing in that sys- 
tem but the instrument of God Almighty. Man is a 
poor earthly vessel, but he may have in him God's 
omnipotent power ; and what a power that is ! Though 
the machine be of flesh and blood, it is moved by the 
omnipotence of God. We utter God's truth, we do his 



242 EXTEMPOKANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

will — that is the sense in which the Cromwellian Iron- 
sides charged, and the Puritans struck the rocky strand 
of New England. It was a sense that they were the 
vehicles through which the divine sovereignty flowed. 
It may go too far and make a man think too little of 
himself— for it is possible to think too little of one's 
self as well as too much — but, at the same time, if we 
are instruments of divine sovereignty, and that becomes 
a prominent fact before us, it is a mighty power. 

On the other hand, diligent effort — moral works 
rather than great reformatory or revolutionary achieve- 
ments—come out of the sense of man's freedom. It 
is the tendency of modern times to dwell somewhat 
exclusively on man's responsibility — on what man has 
to do. That is the track in which much of our 
modern thought runs, especially of what we call the 
liberal character. It has a great deal to say of moral 
obligation. It seeks to establish the notion that prayer 
is not everything, and that man must work with his 
prayer. It has been the mainspring of philanthropy. 
Men, feeling a deep sense of moral obligation to their 
fellow-men, have made strenuous efforts for humanity — 
not of a revolutionary character, such as have marked 
the great eras of history, but in the form of moral 
movements. Men have said, " I ought to do this ; I 
ought to make this sacrifice for my fellow-men/' and 
out of this sense of personal re>ponsibility have arisen 
many of those glorious moral reforms. 

Now everybody sees that these two things — the 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIRATIONS. 



143 



sense of dependence and of responsibility — ought to 
unite. Logically we can not find the hinge where they 
come together, but practically we can. I do not know 
that any man who resolves to live truly, finds any 
trouble with either of these facts — that the sovereignty 
of God disturbs his diligence in the performance of 
his duty, or that his sense of personal responsibility 
takes away his feeling of dependence on God. But 
we may go to the extreme, and depend upon human 
effort entirely ; we may feel that man must do some- 
thing for himself, and that when he fails, all is over. 
You will hear sometimes a tone of despondency in this 
class of people. Men after acting as though there was 
not a God working behind everything, and after experi- 
encing a transient defeat in a righteous cause in conse- 
quence of some temporary balk, will exclaim, " It is no 
use ; sin is too much for us — wickedness is too great." 
Too much — too great for what ? For your puny arm ; 
but is it too much or too great, think you, for the Lord 
who sits in the heavens, and who does his will among 
the inhabitants of the earth \ We are a hasty people, 
growing more and more so, and we think the millen- 
nium should be organized in our own day — that it 
should be inaugurated and put in perfect working 
order in about ten years, forgetting that, with the 
Lord, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand 
years as one day ; unmindful of the fact that he works 
serenely — never resting — but pouring his infinite will 
through all vehicles and receptacles, through all minds 



EXTEMPOKANEOUS DISCOUPvSES. 

and all hearts — sure in the end to bring about the 
great result. 

Oh, sublime, glorious faith for faltering, disappoint- 
ed man to fall back upon — that Almighty God sits at 
the helm of the universe, and steers the mighty ship 
through all ages ; that his will is sure, to be clone ; that 
the ordinance that has gone from his mouth will not 
be balked ; that before the brightness of his glory all 
darkness will pass away ; that before the infinitude of 
his love and goodness all evil will come to an end, and 
in due time he will regulate the earth to his purpose, 
and gather together in one all things in Christ Jesus. 
Do we not sometimes, in our excessive sense of moral 
duty, forget this grand truth which we need — that 
there is a rock that is higher that we ; that there is an 
infinite, a supreme, to which we must be lifted up ? 
Ah, there is something worse even than that. There 
is a general irreverence growing out of it in our 
times. Men think they must do everything, until by- 
and-by they come to think they are everything. 
They come to consider themselves as gods. They 
speak as though they unfolded history, founded colo- 
nies, built up empires, wrought revolutions. Little man 
thinks he is ruler of the earth, and that all the grand 
changes in the drama of history are wrought by him- 
self, and he struts about as if there were no God — no 
ruler above him. 

We must hold on to evervthino; that is o;ood in the 
sense of personal responsibility, and everything that 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIEATIONS. ^4.5 

inspires or generates human philanthropic effort ; but 
we must come back to the grand old religious trust- 
to that rock on which we can lean, and from which we 
must start in every grand effort. When we undertake 
to embark in a great work, it will not do to depend 
upon ourselves alone; we must feel that we are placed 
at our post but for a day, and that there is One who 
steers the ship, who guides the event, and will bring it 
out all right, though we may not behold it in our day 
or generation. Our duty is to be diligent at our post, 
but to trust to One who is over and above us, and who 
will accomplish his purpose in his own good time. 

So I come to observe, finally, that there are occa- 
sions in life when religion demonstrates itself to be a 
special need and prompting of the soul ; when not 
only is this text found to be the language of religion, 
above all science and all mere morality, but above all 
mere logical arguments, above all debates, above all 
controversy ; when there breaks out a demonstration 
of the truths of religion in just such language and ex- 
perience as that which is contained in the words of 
the text — " When my heart is overwhelmed, lead me 
to the rock that is higher than I." You never can 
upset religion. It is one of the grand, prominent 
faculties of human nature ; that is demonstrated. It 
is one of the most foolish acts of folly in the world to 
talk of religion as some superstition that is going to 
pass away in time, and of a period that will arrive 
when all men shall depend merely on their brains foi 



146 EXTEMPOKANEOUS DIS COTJESE8 

what hurnan nature wants ; and when all religion will 
be looked upon just as strangely, and with as just 
as much ridicule, as we now look back upon the most 
groveling superstitions of the world. Some men think 
that the grand spiritual laws which Christ laid down, 
and the noble truths he uttered, of love to God and 
man, and all that constitutes the domain of religious 
faith will pass away like a cloud, and that we shall 
stand in the clear sunlight of positive knowledge. I 
can tell you, my friends, that man's everlasting, deep 
experience contradicts all that ; for there are times and 
occasions when out of something that is more pro- 
found and more radical than reason or intelligence, 
breaks forth the deep, earnest prayer, " Lead me to the 
rock that is higher than I !" 

Let a man get what he can with the intellect. 
It is a good thing ; it gives us a point of observation. 
I have no sympathy with those that sneer at intel- 
lectual religion. There is a class of men who think 
that faith is nothing but wishy-washy nonsense, and 
yet hold to it for all that. Such is the abjectness of 
some men, that just in proportion as a thing puzzles, 
tangles, and humiliates reason, in that proportion do 
they believe in it. Does God Almighty ask you to ig- 
nore consciousness — to sacrifice reason ? Give me an 
intellectual religion which, so far as my human reason 
can go, shines forth clear as sunlight. It is time we 
had more of it ; there is too much of religion that is 
tradition, too much of it that is opposed to intelligence. 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIRATIONS. 

Let us get all we can by the intellect, and hold on to 
it, for it will help us much in the religious life. 

There is great good in moral habits, if by them a 
man can in any way bind himself to rectitude. I have 
no great faith in the man who simply has a nest of 
habits without any guiding, settled principle ; but if 
he can build around him an inclosure of moral habits 
it will do him good. They may serve the same purpose 
as a go-cart for a little child to learn to walk by, sup- 
porting him while he is weak, until he is able to walk 
alone. There is great good in moral habits ; but, after 
all, when you want to look for the strength of a man, 
for that which will enable him to bear and to achieve, 
you must look to the heart ; you must look to that for 
the spring of effort and power. Religion addresses 
the heart ; Christianity addresses the heart ; all vital 
truth of God strikes at the heart, as the source of re- 
generation and noble action — not at the intellect — not 
at the moral habits. Why? Because without the 
heart the mere gifts of intellectual light, of moral char- 
acter, are not enough. How often you see men with 
the clearest intellects who are the most abject cowards 
in the world ! How common is the spectacle of a man 
gifted with brilliant genius, capable of the most pro- 
found investigations, and endowed with rare acquire- 
ments, who, after all, is a moral coward, afraid to put 
forth his convictions, lest perchance he shall tread on 
the toes of some one he does not wish to offend! "What 
such a man lacks is heart. On the other hand, you see 



][48 XTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUES. 

men of good moral purposes wh* are weak simply be- 
cause they have no strong, clear principles. They are 
sometimes touched through, their weakness by tempta- 
tion, and thus fall. I suppose some of the worst sins 
in the world are committed, not so much from bad 
motives, as from weakness ; men lack moral strength. 
A great many sins you can trace to weakness of heart 
without any deliberately bad motive. We want a 
strong heart, if we would have a strong man and a 
true life. 

But, after all, is the heart strong in itself? I am in- 
clined to think that the heart of man always remains a 
kind of infant in this world. It is the tenderest, soft- 
est place, and ought to be ; it is a glorious thing that it 
is. Sometimes it puts on a little bravery, just as a 
child braces itself up with a mock courage ; but it is 
very fitful and very timid, and when you get at the 
core of it, it is the most tender thing in the world. 
The roughest, strongest man has got his fears; he 
shrinks just as he did when a child ; and, if he is a true 
man, he is glad to come and lean his head on the bosom 
of G-od, as he was wont, when a child, to nestle in the 
lap of his mother. You find under rough and hard ex- 
teriors soft, generous, kindly feelings. 

But the true courage that men have does not come 
out of the heart ; that is what I want to urge. I do 
not mean the courage that blusters — the mere bravado 
that bullies all the world. True courage, I say, does 
not come out of the heart, bnt out of something higher. 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIEATIONS. 

The strong men in this world have been strong, not in 
their own heart, but in their reliance upon something 
higher and stronger than that. You must get at the 
heart to find the spring and power of nobleness ; but 
when you get at it, the strength is not there ; it comes 
from something higher. So there is great force in the 
words of the Psalmist: ""When my heart is over- 
whelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I" — 
feeling as though when the heart went, everything 
went. The intellect may become dim, but we can 
wait till the light breaks through it ; our moral pur- 
poses may grow weak, but we can try to do better ; but 
when the heart is overwhelmed — the timid, shrinking 
heart — when sorrow comes upon us, when the daylight 
of God's goodness darkens and blackens, and the heart 
seems gone, then we must cry, " Lead me to the rock 
that is higher than I." Yes, that is a grand prayer — 
is there a man who does not need to utter it ? Is there 
a man who can say, "I am contented with earthly good, 
I am strong in my resources, I need nothing higher 
than myself?" 

" Lead me to the rock." It is the fittest comparison 
in the world. There are times when we need shade 
like the shadow of a great rock. Prosperity, I think, 
is the greatest trial that a man can go through — worse 
than adversity. The trial of faith in prosperity is 
terrible. We talk of trial in trouble. That is the 
time faith is born. Look at those who have the most 
faith, and they are not those who have the most hap- 



EXTEMPOPw ANEOU8 DISCOUESES. 

piness. That poor old widow, wrapped in her weeds, 
who has laid her last son in the grave, what a beauti- 
ful faith she has, burning like an eternal lamp in the 
sepulcher of the loved ones ! That heart that has been 
scarred and crushed, only holds its trust more firmly in 
the Infinite. But the man who has been fed and 
crammed with worldly good is often prone to say, 
"Who is God, that I should praise him?" If man 
knew his danger, while he would thank God for pros- 
perity, he would pray always, " In my prosperity and 
happiness be with me, like a rock that is higher than I, 
and give me a cool and sanctifying shadow." 

Then there are times when we need a rock for shel 
ter. When troubles, cares, and oppositions come upon 
us, and we find ourselves unable to withstand them, 
we need something like a rock to cover us. When 
pelts too fiercely the storm, and too great a torrent of 
sorrow is poured out upon us, then we need the shelter 
of a rock that is higher than we. 

There are times, too, when we need something like a 
rock, upon which we can lean. Our friends are pass- 
ing away, disappointments come upon us, we are re- 
minded of the mutability of human life; we want 
something solid, like a rock, to support us, a foundation 
for the soul to stand upon. Wealth is uncertain; we 
want something enduring — something that can not be 
shaken or removed. 

There is a great deal of significance in the saying ot 
the ancient mathematician, that if he had a point upon 



FAITH AND ITS ASPIRATIONS. \§\ 

which he could place his lever, he could move the 
world. If a man can get one fact, and not the sem- 
blance of a fact, he can move the world. We want 
something solid, something high, that shall lift us up 
above all transitoriness — something strong, upon which 
we can depend. And when changes come, as they 
will, when death's touch is upon us, making us to feel 
that our hold on earth is giving way, then shall we not 
pray, "Lead me to the rock that is higher than I!" 
Now and ever, in joy and sorrow, in good and evil, 
while we are in life and strength, let us cling to that 
sure support; and when earth itself is dissolving be- 
neath our feet, let us look up with steadfast hope to the 
Rock that is higher than we. 



CONCEPTIONS OF RELIGION. 



What "went ye out into the wilderness to see? — Matt. xi. 7. 

I TAKE these words in their connection with the 
three or four verses following, in which the same 
question is reiterated. They were addressed, yon will 
remember, to the multitude, after certain messengers 
whom John the Baptist sent to Jesus had accomplished 
their mission and retired; and the repeated question 
refers to that great preacher and reformer. Our 
Saviour asks the people for what purpose they had 
flocked to the ministry of John. "Was it merely to see 
a reed shaken by the wind that they had gone out into 
the wilderness of Jordan? And he inquires again, Was 
it to see a man clothed in soft raiment ? And a^ain, 
"Was it to see only a prophet ? Each of these questions 
implied a negative answer, and Jesus goes on to say, 
"A prophet? yea, I say unto you, and more than a 
prophet ; for this is he of whom it is written, Behold 1 
send my messenger before thy face, which shall pre- 
pare thy way before thee." And then he proceeds to 
unfold the proper character of John, and his intimate 
relations to the expected Messiah. 

7* 



EXTEMP0KANE0US DISC0UKSES. 

"With some difference in place and time, it seems to 
me that these questions are as applicable to the mass 
of the people now, as when they were first uttered. 
]STow, as then, they suggest the different conceptions of 
religion which prevail in the minds of men. Indeed, 
in this matter, I think we may divide men into differ- 
ent classes, each marked by some dominant conception 
of religion, which corresponds with sufficient accuracy 
to the different ideas or motives indicated in the pas- 
sages connected with the text. 

In the first place, there are those whose idea or feel- 
ing of religion is a weak, vacillating, or vague princi- 
ple. It has no strong or no prominent hold in their 
minds and hearts, or it is regarded as a mere abstrac- 
tion. "What went ye out into the wilderness to see?" 
asks Jesus, "A reed shaken by the wind?" Now these 
words are capable of two interpretations. First, they 
may have a literal reference to the reeds which grew 
on the banks of the Jordan, and the question, there- 
fore, may imply that it surely could not have been with 
such a trivial motive as to look upon the commonplace 
scenery in that region, that the people went crowding 
into the wilderness, but that a higher motive impelled 
them — a more worthy purpose than merely to see a 
reed shaken by the wind, or to look at a man clothed in 
soft raiment. And yet, my friends, to how many is 
religion hardly a more important matter even than this 
— a matter of mere curiosity. How many there are 
who owe the only interest they feel in religious subjects 



CONCEPTIONS OF EELIGION. ]_55 

merely to some transient excitement, like wind blow- 
ing among reeds, or some peculiarity of manner, or 
method, like soft raiment. They flock to listen to 
some sensation topic, or to admire and wonder at 
some peculiar style of delivery or expression in the 
preacher. They rush together as they would to some 
extraordinary dramatic performance; or with the same 
feeling with which they would throng to the place 
where some maddened husband shoots his wife's para- 
mour; or where some noted politician is found dead 
and robbed. They go merely with a morbid interest 
to hear what the preacher will say about this or that 
occurrence, and to prolong the newspaper excitement 
of the week with a text from the Bible on Sunday. 
IsTow I do not say that exciting events of the week 
should never be noticed on Sunday. On the contrary, 
I believe that the preacher may take an illustration 
of the eternal truths which he preaches from anything 
that will embody and vivify those truths, and that for 
the most wholesome and spiritual purposes, the pre- 
vailing current of popular thought and feeling may be 
led into religious and devout channels. Religion has 
no limited or monopolized phraseology. Every great 
fact of nature, or of society, may be transmuted into a 
- parable of the divine word, even as Jesus found the wit- 
nesses of his truth in the lilies that waved in the field 
before him, and in the fisherman casting his net into 
the sea. Bring forth out of the treasury things new 
and old, so that the eternal veritv of Christian teaching 



156 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

inay be aided in its war to the minds and hearts of men 
by a perpetual freshness. 

I am speaking now of the motives and feelings with 
which people are impelled to the ministrations of re- 
ligion, and I say they are often motives and feelings of 
mere curiosity, the object being simply to prolong the 
period of excitement, to work upon the nerves, to 
stir up the imagination, or to produce, in some way 
or other, a startling effect. Religion itself, speaking 
through these things, has no more vital purpose or re- 
sult than a reed shaken by the wind. 

I think many a man has felt this difficulty in the 
present day, in the fact that quiet, sober themes, 
calmly treated, can hardly find a place — can hardly get 
a hearing. People find them dull and stupid; they 
complain that they do not wake them up. They must 
have a gospel hot and spiced, and therefore a great 
deal of our religious preaching has become a kind of 
Sabbath performance announced in great hand-bills 
or advertisements, with capital letters, and with sensa- 
tion notices. Or if this is not the object with which 
many people come to the ministrations of religion, it 
is perhaps merely the preacher's manner that attracts 
them. It is not the things he says, but his odd way of 
saying them, his curious, original manner, his dramatic 
power. Or, perhaps, with a great many, it is be- 
cause some ministers look interesting in the pulpit, 
have an engaging manner, and an impressive style. 
All this is apart from the real purpose and efficacy of 



CONCEPTIONS OF RELIGION. J 5^ 

the truth, and is just as trivial as though the people of 
Palestine had gone into the wilderness to see a reed 
shaken by the wind, or a man clothed in soft raiment. 

I say, then, if we interpret the words of the text to 
mean that Christ referred literally to the reeds of Jor- 
dan, it still illustrates that unimportant curiosity with 
which a large class wait upon the ministration of relig- 
ion. But if, as seems most likely, these words are 
meant to describe the conceptions or preconceptions of 
the multitude respecting John, I repeat, they fitly rep- 
resent a certain class in regard to religion. For after 
all, it may be said of the mass, that their feeling in 
regard to religion is not one of curiosity. That, at 
any particular time, may be the predominant element 
or aspect of the case, but in all men there is a deep 
sense of something in the thing itself, and not in the 
mere occasion or mere manner of presenting it. Re- 
ligion is felt to be — though often very vaguely, very 
fitfully — a vital interest in the world — something that 
can not be voted out of the universe — something that 
will push its way, and make its claim, no matter 
what other interests are crowded on the human heart. 
Yet while there may be this feeling to which I allude, 
men look upon religion, and accept its ministration, 
very much as a certain class would seem to have 
accepted John the Baptist ; they look upon it as some- 
thing weak, vacillating, and vague — nothing that is 
strong, pervading, and deep. In one word, religion 
to them is not a reality in its height, breadth, and 



258 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

deptli. The notion of it quivers in their minds like a 
reed shaken with the wind. Religion is not held by 
the world at large to be a strong principle — something 
fitted for our maturity, for our manhood, for the ripe- 
ness of life, for the shock of action, for the world's 
great work; but something for our sickness, for our 
trouble, for our day of darkness, for our hour of death. 
Men do not take hold of it as they take hold of scien- 
tific principles, and make it the prime standard by 
which they test things. They do not take hold of it as 
they do of an interest in trade, and make it uppermost in 
every purchase and sale they make. It is held slightly 
as something which they do not really need. They say 
practically, "We do not want it when we are strong 
and well, but when we are weak and sick ; we do not 
need it in the shock of the world, when we have some- 
thing else to attend to ; but when we are dying — to 
speak words of comfort and triumph to us." Men ignore 
the fact that the strongest principle in this world is the 
religious principle : that the manliest element in the 
human soul is the religious element : that the clearest 
and surest guide for the most common and practical 
affairs of life is religion. 

Shrewd men of the world think that religion has no 
business with the affairs of men. in the rush of action. 
And in politics it is well known that conscience is de- 
liberately ignored, and the teachings of Jesus Christ 
thrust aside. Political parties are based upon the 
platform of vacillating policy, and held together by 



CONCEPTIONS OF EELIGION. ^59 

the weak bands of worldly expediency. They thrust 
great religious questions out of the political field. 
Anything that is deep enough to touch the conscience, 
is too deep to carry Presidents into the chair. Put it 
one side; it is not available; that is the motto of politi- 
cians. "What is it but saying that religion is unsuited 
for strong, practical action, and is adapted only for 
the flimsiest kind of life ? 

On the contrary, my friends, I think we do not need 
religion so much in retirement as in the shock of ac- 
tion — not so much when we are shut in from the world, 
as when the great waves of temptation are pressing 
upon us — not so much for private as for public action. 
For, after all, private action is more apt, I think, to be 
shaped by conscience than public action. A duel is now 
held by many to be despicable, but war is not looked 
upon as a very great evil. Public action is not so far 
ahead in the Christian course as private. The law of 
conscience is not recognized in national policy as in in- 
dividual actions, and men will do a thing as President, 
Governor, or politician, that they would not do as pri- 
vate citizens. The principles of Jesus Christ are very 
commonly discarded in public action. Peligion is 
looked upon as a reed shaken with the wind — as a thing 
to be taken hold of at the last hour. When a man is 
drifting: down the river of death, and there is nothing 
else that he can take hold of, then he seizes religion, 
and clings to that. He feels then as the sick man did, 
who, when he was told that he must die, answered, 



IgQ EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOUPwSES. 

" Well, then, at last I must think of God." Men keep 
out of tlieir minds as long as they can the everlasting 
truth of God — the eternal interests of their souls, the 
light of life, the interpretation of the world's mysteries, 
and then, when all things else are gliding from beneath 
their feet, they cling to the reed shaken bv the wind on 
the banks of the Jordan of death. 

Or else men hold religion in this manner : If they do 
not conceive it to be something weak and vacillat- 
ing, they at least hold it in a weak and vacillating way 
— they hold it fitfully. How many there are who 
are very religious in one hour, and very wicked in 
the next — praying on Sunday, and cheating on Mon- 
day — honest to-day, and rushing into some infamous 
bargain to-morrow — carried away in one year by the 
wave of religious excitement, shouting hallelujahs to 
the throne of God, and in another year as cold and 
dead as fish that have been left high and dry by the re- 
ceding tide. Xo wave of excitement now — no life — all 
fitful, momentary, transient. 

Or else it is merely in a traditional way that men 
hold religion. They believe in it because their fathers 
and grandfathers believed in it. They have never 
tested it by their own consciences, but merely taken it 
as they take their estates, their houses, or their pews in 
church. 

Or perhaps religion is held by them because it is re- 
spectable. How many there are resting with perfect 
composure, merely on the respectability of their creed! 



CONCEPTIONS OF EELIGION. ^61 

They know it is fashionable and proper, and that is all 
they care about. They are contented with a creed 
that is orthodox or respectable, just as they are grati- 
fied with a nice pair of gloves or a smooth hat. It is 
proper, it is respectable, and therefore they suppose 
that any one who utters something a little bold and 
heretical — who dares to take an independent course 
that runs counter to the prevailing faith — must be 
some terrible fellow who has committed a great outrage. 
True, they do not know in what respect ; they have 
never verified it themselves; they suppose they are on 
the right side, of course, but they do not know why, 
having never tested a single principle that they pro- 
fess. They are horrified at the heretic's heresy and the 
infidel's infidelity. How do they know the heretic is 
wrong, or the infidel mistaken, except by the common 
report of the respectable party of which they are 
merely excrescences ? They have never exercised their 
own reason upon the prevailing problems of religion, 
but simply because the majority of their faith have 
declared against the heretic, they fall in and denounce 
him. "What do they know of the heretic's struggles 
or the infidel's sorrows ? What do they know of the 
reasons that have led the man to be an infidel — how he 
has endeavored to sound the problems of life, it may 
be by a false method, and has reached a wrong conclu- 
sion ? What do they know of the honesty of purpose 
with which he has reached that result ? Little do they 
imagine that the heretic's error or the infidel's false- 



Ig2 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

hood may be nobler than their truth, because it is held 
in a nobler way and vindicated by a manlier effort. 
It is sad to think how much of this respectable religion 
there is, that has about as much strength and vigor in 
it as a reed shaken by the wind. 

I observe, in the second place, that there is a class 
to whom religion is merely an affair of sentiment. 
They are represented by those people who went tc 
John the Baptist, expecting to see a man clothed in 
soft raiment. There are many people to whom relig- 
ion is merely a matter of raiment and upholstery — 
sleeves and cassocks, table covers and altar cloths — 
nice proprieties and esthetic beauty. I have no ob- 
jection to esthetics in religion — to that element which 
has built the cathedrals and produced some of the 
most splendid works of genius; but I have an objec- 
tion to a mere imitation of these things growing out 
of no deep want or aspiration, but merely out of a 
kind of esthetic impressibility. In the matter of the 
liturgy there are those to whom it is a necessity. It is 
consecrated in their deepest affections ; it is hallowed 
by their most sacred memories ; it is associated with 
their holiest duties in life. They can pray most de- 
voutly and meditate most profoundly through its set 
forms. But it does not follow that other kinds of 
people, educated to a different set of expressions, 
should adopt a religions form because it is impressive 
and beautiful. It is merely substituting esthetics for 
religion ; and people go to hear vespers and fine music 



CONCEPTIONS OF KELIGION. ]^g3 

with just such feelings as they go to hear Casta Diva 
or the March in the Prophet. Where this kind of 
worship comes out of the soul — the burning desire of 
the heart — I honor it. There is a great deal of grand- 
eur and power in the old English liturgy — one of the 
noblest compositions ever written — and I can conceive 
how persons, born and baptized in that church, are 
attached to it. But to hold to it for its mere esthetic 
effect and impressibility is to make it a matter of soft 
raiment. 

So, in another view, religion is with some a matter 
of soft raiment, from the idea that it is merely a mat- 
ter of comfort and consolation. Men look at it as a 
very soothing, cheering thing. And so it often is, no 
doubt. God forbid that I should deny the great con- 
soling power of the religion of Jesus Christ, or fail to 
bear witness to the truth that it alone can comfort the 
troubled soul and lift up the heart that is bowed down 
with sorrow. But we must not forget that it has a 
strengthening and inspiring influence, also, as well as 
a comforting and consoling power — that it encourages 
as well as soothes, and makes men brave as well as 
confiding. 

Others do not like to have a religion that has any- 
thing to do with agitation or reform. They do not be- 
lieve in bringing into the pulpit on Sunday matters 
that agitate the community through the week. They 
want to come to church to be quiet and comfortable. 
" Do not talk to us," they say, " upon questions that 



EXTEMPOE ANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

are like fire applied to gunpowder. Don't shatter the 
brandy flasks, and disturb our domestic peace. Don't 
bring in the 'negro question.' Point us to the mild 
and gentle Jesus; we don't want the chains of the 
African paraded before us. True, Jesus Christ did say- 
something about breaking yokes, and letting the op- 
pressed go free. True, John the Baptist was a little 
scathing when he spoke to the people of his time. 
But those cases are rather exceptional and miraculous ; 
we don't, at all events, require any such preaching in 
our day." "What a notion this is of the religion of 
Jesus Christ — that it is simply a calming, soothing, 
comforting thing, and has in it no thunder and light- 
ning of everlasting truth ! 

Then there are some who don't want to hear sharp, 
hard epithets from the preacher. Some of our Univer- 
salist people are even shocked when they hear such a 
word as " hell" or " damnation" from the pulpit. It 
is in the Bible, to be sure ; but because it has been 
caricatured in the gross imagery of a dark theology, 
and interpreted to mean undying agonies, they do not 
like to hear even the word mentioned. Some want 
classic eloquence. They will hardly admit the ver- 
nacular at all ; there must be no chopping and split- 
ting ; the preacher must use no axe and beetle ; only a 
smoothing-plane and polisher. I do not deny that 
there are tendencies in our times to go into extremes — 
but if a man is religiously in earnest he will not run 
into them ; his theme, his natural reverence, will keep 



CONCEPTIONS OF RELIGION. Jgg 

him within their bounds. But this putting aside every 
sharp word, because it is not classic or soft, is all non- 
sense. The most efficient preaching in this world, the 
preaching that has carried the most weight with it, has 
always been sharp, strong, severe, and sometimes 
what would be called coarse. Look at Hugh Latimer, 
in his sermon on the plow, in which he says to the 
rulers and officers, " Look to your charge, and rather 
be glad to amend your ill living, than to be angry 
when told of your faults." And in speaking of cer- 
tain prelates and bishops he says, "Some of them 
wear velvet slippers. Such fellows ought not to be 
admitted to preach. I pray God to amend such world- 
ly fellows, or else they are not meet to be preachers." 
Such was the plain, direct style of speech with which 
old Latimer addressed the English prelates and 
bishops. Well might such a man exclaim to his com- 
panion when the martyr-fires played around them, 
" Be of great comfort ; we shall kindle such a fire to- 
day in England as I trust will not be put out." 

So Robert South used plain words, calling things by 
their right names. " Can anything in nature," says 
he, " be more odious than a wicked old man who, after 
three-score years in the world, after so many sacra- 
ments, sermons, and other means of grace taken in and 
digested, shall continue as arrant a hypocrite and dis- 
believer in religion as ever ; still dodging and doub- 
ling, never opening his mouth in earnest except when 
he eats or breathes ? Or can anything be so vile as 



IQQ EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOUKSES. 

an open sensualist creeping to the devil on all fours, so 
wretched, despised, and abandoned by all. that even 
his own vices forsake him ?" Some people think that 
would be very coarse preaching, but I have no doubt 
it stuck like an arrow in men's hearts, when, if he had 
preached soft words, his hearers would have felt as if 
they had taken a glass of champagne, and have ex- 
pressed themselves as glad that they had a minister who 
didn't meddle with politics and other agitating topics. 
A preacher who is in earnest can not choose his words 
always ; the truth comes sometimes in its common 
dress, and you can not tear away the epithet from it 
any more than you can tear the living tissue from the 
body. So far as preaching is concerned, language 
should not be used, as Talleyrand said of diplomacy, 
to conceal the meaning, but to make it plain. It 
should be a probe for the conscience, rather than an 
emollient for the skin. 

In the next place, there are those who regard relig- 
ion simply in its supernatural character. They look 
for nothing less remarkable or worthy than a prophet. 
They apprehend religion merely and solely in its con- 
nection with miracles — with supreme power and un- 
seen things. They are of that class that come out to 
see a prophet. I am sure I need not dwell upon the 
fact that religion is regarded by many as above this 
life, overshadowing and eclipsing it, instead of touch- 
ing and consecrating all the facts of this life, and link- 
ing them in one web of vast relations with eternal and 



CONCEPTIONS OF RELIGION. JgJ 

unseen things. We have got to learn how nrnch relig 
ion has to do with every day, and not merely with the 
next world ; how much it has to do with every thought, 
and not merely with some grand performance of our 
lives ; how it makes all our life far from common or 
commonplace, since it makes us see the supernatural 
everywhere. 

Two able men, in our day, have written two remark- 
able books. One finds only nature in all things, and 
the other brings the supernatural to overwhelm the 
natural. Now, I repeat, religion brings out of life the 
truth of things natural and supernatural. When we 
take the exclusively supernatural phase of religion, two 
results come out of it all the world over. Religion, 
on the one hand, is to some a matter of darkness and 
gloom — the revelation of a terrible reality overhang- 
ing them, and threatening to crush them — and they 
are weighed down with the nightmare of superstition. 
On the other hand, being considered as a thing above 
this world — something unworldly and unreal — a great 
many do not regard it with any kind of faith at all, 
and they retire to the opposite pole of skepticism. 
Thus you have this remarkable trait of mankind, that 
the most superstitious man to-day becomes the greatest 
infidel to-morrow, and the boldest infidel of to-day runs 
into the greatest credulity to-morrow. Religion has 
become to them a matter of great sights and sounds. 

Now no man, it seems to me, can for a moment deny 
that there exists the great element of the super- 



][68 EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOTJE9ES. 

natural in religion. I see it in the religion of Jesus 
Christ. I have never been troubled with the miracles 
that he wrought so long as I believe in the divine 
spirit that shines through him. I have supposed that 
the hand that formed the human body can raise that 
body from the dead; that the power that bids the 
waves roll, can command them to cease ; that the 
sovereign agent that moves the mechanism of nature, 
can bid it stop ; and when I see a life like that of 
Jesus, so perfect, so full of the Godhead, it does not 
trouble me when I hear him say, "Lazarus, come 
forth !" or to the tempest, " Peace, be still." It all 
seems naturally to flow out of such a being as that ; it 
is not a mere prodigy — something wonderful — but 
something in perfect harmony with the whole life. 
You can not tear away the miracles from Jesus Christ, 
any more than you can his personal features. Take 
them away, and you have broken up the entire fabric 
of the Gospel. They stand there naturally, and yet 
supernaturally. Show me a being like Christ, and I 
will believe that he can perform miracles like him. 
But where is such a life to be found ? We have not 
seen it. A being in perfect conformity with God can 
do the works that Christ did. 

Nor am I troubled about prophecy. A prophecy is 
a great and glorious fact, but is it more wonderful and 
glorious than the event ? 

So, then, I see the authenticity of the supernatural in 
Christianity, and I see the office of it. It had an 



CONCEPTIONS OF EELIGION. 



169 



office in the early days that it has not now. It would 
strike the senses then as it does not now, because we 
must go up the chain of evidence to justify the fact of 
miracles. I do not believe the supernatural is the 
foundation of religion, but that religion is the founda- 
tion of the supernatural. I believe that miracles are 
a deduction from Jesus Christ, and not Jesus Christ a 
deduction from the miracles. The supernatural, there- 
fore, is not the exclusive element in religion. The 
great power of the Gospel to me is its immediate appli- 
cation to my wants, to my soul's life, to my best de- 
sires, to my immortal prospects. That is the everlast- 
ing verification of it to me. I accept the supernatural 
in the religion of Jesus Christ, but I find him not 
merely a prophet, but more than a prophet. 

Religion is not then a reed shaken by the wind, nor 
a man clothed with soft raiment, nor a prophet. It is 
something higher. " This is he of whom it is written, 
Behold I send my messenger before thy face, which 
shall prepare thy way before thee." That was said of 
John the Baptist ; it is equally true concerning relig- 
ion itself ; it is equally applicable to us, leading us to a 
true conception of religion. For religion is not an end — ■ 
it is a means. Some people think that to get religion 
is to get the end of life. I say that religion is not the 
end of life. I say a man may get religion sometimes, 
and be very far from the end for which God appointed 
him. Sometimes religion is made to override morality ; 
men carry it out into asceticism. Then another class 

8 



170 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOUESES, 

of men arise who preach mere morality — our duties to 
ourselves, our families, and to humanity. And then, 
again, somebody comes in and injects the great prin- 
ciple of religion, and so we keep vacillating. This 
shows that the end of the Gospel is something more 
than religion. Religion is a messenger of God. bo to 
speak, touching the deep sanctities of the conscience, 
waking up our intuitions of God and immortality, and 
by its vast realities and rich truths leading to some 
higher end. And what is that end to which religion 
leads us \ Its great end is. to bring Chris: into the 
soul, even as John the Baptist introduced him into the 
world. "YThen the spirit of Jesus Christ comes into 
our souls and we become one with him, when his life 
becomes our life — his life of holiness, perfect obedience 
and self-sacrifice — then we reach the great end of our 
being. So it is not merely religion as an element of 
the supernatural that we are to seek, but it is the end 
to which we come through religion, namely, to com- 
munion and oneness with Jesus Christ. 

And now, my friends, comes the question, what is 
religion to you \ You attend upon its ministration, 
you hear its word, you have some notion about it ; 
what is it \ A reed shaken by the wind \ A vague, 
vacillating principle \ Something that you put clear 
aside as having no real practical claim upon your active 
moments and the daily work of life ? Is it something 
that you hold traditionally or respectably — a man 
clothed in soft raiment ? Is it merely something com- 



CONCEPTIONS OF RELIGION. m 

forting, soothing, and calming — something that makes 
you feel good? Is it something that inspires you to 
duty, or rebukes you? Is it something merely super- 
natural that you hardly believe — something awful, 
concerning the nature of which you have no clear con- 
ception? Or is it Jesus Christ within you the hope of 
glory — his life, his power taken into your heart ; ani- 
mating your soul, inspiring you in every action and 
breath of your being ? That is the great end, and if 
you have not reached it, with peculiar force comes to 
you the question of our Saviour, " What went ye out 
into the wilderness to see ?" 



THE BREAD OF LIFE. 



But lie answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by 
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
of G-od. — Matthew iv. 4. 

AS Jesus was in all points tempted like as we are, 
it seems no strained or fanciful interpretation 
of these transactions in the wilderness to say, that they 
represent different classes or orders of temptations as 
they occur in the personal history of men ; and if such 
is the case, then it may be affirmed that the particular 
temptation to which the words in the text refer, sym- 
bolizes the distinction and the conflict between the 
claims of man's higher and his lower life. Or rather, 
I may say, these words vindicate the jurisdiction of 
man's higher life against the encroachments or usurpa- 
tions of his lower life. Here was an appeal to hunger ; 
a solicitation to sacrifice right and duty to appetite. 
No matter what particular interpretation we give to this 
narrative ; whether we take it as recording a literal 
temptation by a personal Satan ; whether we take it as 
recording a vision or a suggestion arising in the mind 
of Christ from the nature of the conditions in which he 
was placed ; the essence of the temptation was that he 



174 



EXTEMPOPwANEOUS DISCOUESES. 



should pervert the powers which were given him for 
the highest ends, for God's service, to the temporary 
gratification of appetite. The reply which Jesns gave 
was, " Man shall not live by bread alone." There is 
another and a nobler condition of living : man's truest 
and most essential life is sustained in other ways than 
through his bodily appetite. " Man shall not live by 
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of 
the mouth of God." 

It seems to me that whatever else may be indicated 
by these words, these two different conditions of 
life are indicated. There is a life which is nourished 
by bread alone, which depends upon meat, drink, rai- 
ment, and the class of material, bodily utilities which 
bread represents and symbolizes. And observe that the 
claims of this kind of life are not denounced or repudi- 
ated in the passage before us. " Man shall not live 
by bread alone," is the declaration. These claims of 
the body, these material necessities, are allowed. 
"While man abides in his present form, and is involved 
in this earthly condition, he must live by bread. 
Christianity is not asceticism. Throughout the New 
Testament you will not find a hint that anything that 
is made has been made in vain, or is to be looked 
upon as a mistake of the Creator, to be denounced and 
avoided. It is a very singular fallacy, it seems to me 
that takes the present condition of the world as the 
rectification of a mistake on the part of God, instead 
of being a development of his steadfast intention from 



THE BREAD 0E LIFE. ^5 

the very first until now. Therefore I say that bread 
has its place. Whatever God has ordained of bodily 
want or of material necessity is in its sphere good and 
right, and should be so regarded; if for no other 
reason, because God has evidently ordained it. But 
whenever in the course of man's career upon this earth 
the question does arise, whether the life of the body or 
the life of the soul, whether the life of the senses or 
the life of the reason and the affections, is to be sacri- 
ficed, whenever any such conflict shall arise between 
the two, then we are to fall back upon this declaration 
of the Saviour — " Man shall not live by bread alone, 
but by every word that proceedeth out the mouth of 
God." That such a conflict often does arise, I hardly 
need say ; it is amply testified to in every man's expe- 
rience, and may be illustrated as I proceed with my 
remarks. 

Let me then speak of these two conditions and ideals 
of life, each in its sphere necessary and compatible 
with the other, and yet let me so characterize them 
that, under any pressure of temptation, under any 
crisis of self-question, we shall have no doubt as to 
which is the highest and the truer life. In the first 
place, then, there is that condition of being in which man 
lives by bread, or by that class of things which bread 
symbolizes and represents. Now, if we take this condi- 
tion of life apart from its true relations, if, so to speak, 
we come to live in that way alone, just consider what 
it implies, and to what it leads. In the first place it 



EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUKSES. 

represents man as utterly subservient to material ne- 
cessities. We know how much force and meaning 
there are in that phrase, " the necessaries of life ;" the 
bread which we must eat, or die ; the clothing we must 
have, or perish. We know how all earthly conditions 
stand secondary to these. "We know, also, how these 
things, and things akin to them, are often made to take 
place above all spiritual and divine things, bread alone 
being considered the great object of life, and man, 
the whole man, is made subservient to material neces- 
sities. Therefore, in the second place, look at the con- 
sequences of this condition of life where man makes 
himself, or is made wholly subservient to material ne- 
cessities ; it makes him to be merely an instrument. 
Now, as I view the purpose of man's creation, he was 
made to be an end. But when, either by the force of 
circumstances, or by his own will, he is subservient to 
material circumstances, he is made to be merely an in- 
strument. In order to procure bread, which is one of 
the means of living, his work, his services, must be of 
sufficient value to others in the great exchange of the 
world, to receive from them in return these means of 
living. Now, let us recognize the vast importance and 
benefit of this condition of things, which is the founda- 
tion of the great ordinance of labor, and the beautiful 
law of reciprocity. It is a curious and wonderful fact 
that the springs of man's noblest life are implanted in 
necessity. God has not let man go alone in the world. 
He walks in leading strings in the highest action of 



THE BREAD OF LIFE. ^jf 

his being; there is a mold cast for him. We may call 
this a doctrine of divine decrees, or what we will, 
there is a mold cast for him, by which in the outset he 
is started, by which he is linked to that condition of 
things, which, if followed out, will lead to his highest 
good. For instance, it is not left to man's indolence to 
pick out that course of life which will lead to his high- 
est good. He is forced by necessity into labor. The 
great law of effort, the only condition by which any 
true development either of the body or the soul is 
attained, has its spring, in the first place, in material 
necessity. I repeat, man is not left to his own conceit ; 
he is not left to pick out the way of action; he is 
forced into effort ; a wondrous and beautiful necessity, 
which arouses the mightiest impulses, which unfolds 
the best faculties of our nature, which wakes up and 
dignifies the whole man, making his sinewy right arm 
a lever which moves the world, and the beaded sweat 
that glistens on his forehead more glorious than a dia- 
dem ; out of whose inexorable hands emerges beauty, 
out of which comes all the marshaled utilities of civil- 
ization, and the attendant train of art, invention, and 
star-crowned science ; a grand march and procession 
of power, and peace, and order, transforming the 
wilderness into a garden, and making the solitary 
place glad — steadily as the sun shines and the earth 
turns, sowing its seed, binding its sheaves, and from 
age to age, and from continent to continent, unrolling 
a splendid panorama of achievement and of victory. 

8* 



178 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 



How beneficial is this requisition for labor, when we 
come to look at it, this requisition for effort, by the ne- 
cessity of having bread ! Man, made a creature of 
appetite, of hunger, and of thirst, by the imperious de- 
mands of these appetites, is forced into those efforts 
which lead to the highest and most glorious results. 
. How intimately has God interwoven that kind of labor 
which comes by the sweat of the brow, with the 
greatest problems and the most momentous interests 
of humanity. Neglect this great interest of agricul- 
ture, the working for our daily bread, and where is the 
foundation of all your glory? What are your vast 
navies, your wooden walls ? what is all the gold of 
your mines and your placers ? nay, what are your insti- 
tutions of education and of government even, if in any 
way you neglect or pervert this great fundamental in- 
terest ? Why, every political economist knows that the 
bread question is the deep question. Upon the condi- 
tions which spring out of the earth depend thrones and 
dynasties, peace and war, order and anarchy. Take the 
bread from the mouths of the starving populations of 
Europe, and questions would be settled in a month 
which diplomatists, playing at peace and war, take years 
to settle. Therefore I say, God has made this a funda- 
mental necessity, and out of it springs the great ben- 
efit of that effort, by which alone comes any true devel- 
opment of body or soul. And another element of 
man's noblest life is unfolded by the necessity for im- 
mediate action ; by his working for his daily bread, 



THE BEEAD OF LIFE. 

For another consequence of this law of effort is 
mutual help, mutual service. Men can not live iso- 
lated. One man can not utterly separate himself 
from another, even if he would. Each needs the 
other, and it is found so all the world over. Man 
shall not live alone. He is not in himself com- 
pletely furnished. The animal may prowl solitary for 
his food ; let him, if he can, live in isolation. It is not 
in the nature of man to be alone. But how shall these 
noble affections, these qualities for mutual love and 
service in man, be called out ? By placing the neces- 
sities of our daily bread in such a way that one man 
can not obtain the whole, but that it must be obtained 
by the system of giving and receiving ; very selfish, 
perhaps, in its origin, yet leading, by-and-by, to a 
nobler and more spiritual comprehension of service. 
Man, learning, by his bodily necessities, the intimate 
dependence he has upon his fellow-man, is led, by-and- 
by, to see the spiritual affinities which link him to his 
fellow-men, and the noblest results of Christian, self- 
sacrificing love come out of that necessity, the want 
of daily bread. No man alone can get his daily bread ; 
he must be helped by others in one form or another. 
All the magnificent structures of commerce, of trade, 
or reciprocal service, throughout society, the wide world 
over, rests upon this fact ; the necessities of our daily 
bread depending upon the mutual action of one upon 
another, by which man, needing bread and the means 
of living, must in some degree become an instrument, 



JgO EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

must bend himself to serve and minister for ends out 
of hiniself. 

But, on the other hand, can we fail to recognize the 
immense evil of that state of things in which man be- 
comes and remains a mere instrument, in one vray or 
another living only for bread, living only for an end out 
of himself, living merely in subservience to that class of 
things which bread represents, There is the great evil 
in this world, and there spring up temptations similar 
in character to those which assailed Christ in the wil- 
derness. Thus man sometimes becomes merely an in- 
strument for getting bread, nothing more, nothing less. 
Sometimes he is so by the very force of circumstances. 
]\Ian — and it is an awful thing to think of — is some- 
times forced by circumstances to be merely an instru- 
ment to get daily bread. He can just manage to gasp, 
grasp, and live in this world. Ample as the earth is, 
and crowned by God with plenty, hundreds and 
thousands of millions are merely able, by every 
effort of muscle, and brain, and soul, to get their daily 
bread. Oh, it is an awful thing when man is reduced 
to be merely an apparatus for breathing and digesting ! 
Be it the man's fault, or the fault of society, it is none 
the less terrible. There are a great many estimates to 
be made in the light of the fact that man should in any 
way be reduced to such a condition as to be merely an 
instrument to get his daily bread. "We may estimate 
the worth of efforts made to elevate the social condition 
of man. Utter these questions; say anything about 



THE BREAD OF LIFE. ^g^ 

false relations between capital and labor, about the 
worMng-man having his rights, you are at once looked 
upon as revolutionary, as striking at the best inter- 
ests of society, or, at best, propounding mere dreams 
and vagaries. It may be that these questions are mere 
dreams to those whose lines are fallen in pleasant 
places, for whom have been furnished a pillow and 
cushion, a full table and an easy chair. Yet there are 
men set desperately to grapple for their lives, drown- 
ing in the midst of plenty, clutching at the food that 
drifts by them, and getting it as they best can. Oh, 
this is a terrible question, this bread question. But it 
is a question which must be solved by every effort of 
a true heart and a clear brain. It must be solved by 
attempts made day by day, year by year, to get at the 
bottom of the problem if we can, and elevate men 
above that condition in which they are merely instru- 
ments for getting their dailv bread. In this wav we 
are to value our institutions which give education to 
all, for in proportion as man becomes developed in 
brain and soul, just in that proportion is he elevated 
above that condition in which he is the mere instru- 
ment of getting his dailv bread. And therefore it is 
to God, and under God, glory to all true men, who 
have thus given us, in this land of ours, our free 
schools, our public institutions, where the rich and the 
poor come together, and drink from the same fountain 
of learning, the same elements of knowledge. VTo 
to the man who would overturn these institutions, who 



EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

would in any way injure them, or limit their capacity 
for good ! 

And thus, also, may we have some measure of esti- 
mating the abomination and the wickedness of systems 
that tend to intensify such a condition, and to make it 
final ; that tend to make man, and to regard him, 
merely as a piece of mechanism, as muscle and 
stomach, as a steam-engine, taking in so much food and 
giving out so much work. Do you not see the essential 
degradation of such a condition as this ? You must 
either revise your definition of what constitutes man, 
either reduce those called men to the grade of animals, 
or, making them out to be men, vou must elevate 
them above that condition in which they are merely 
as machines, as brutes. Do you not see that no 
human law, however stringently enacted it may be, 
hat no man, or set of men, has any right, before God, 
to make one who is a man, endowed with the faculties 
of a man, with soul, heart, will, affections, and an im- 
mortal capacity — to make him a mere machine for re- 
ceiving food and giving out work. And whatever 
perpetuates this is abominable in the sight of God. 
The moment you come to see men reduced to such a 
'condition as that of a mere instrument for daily bread, 
that moment you must abominate any institution that 
intensifies and keeps them in such a condition. 

Moreover, from this point of view, we should learn 
charity; we should remember that what maybe no 
temptation to us, is a keen temptation to many. 



THE BREAD OF LIFE. ]_83 

TYTien a man sees nothing in this world to live for 
but his daily bread, and when that is taken away 
from him, he must perish. I tell yon there are some 
sins which, if we do not pardon, we should look upon 
in the light of the merciful Jesus; we should look 
at the power of temptation of hunger, not only for a 
man himself, but on account of his wife and children ; 
we should look at a great many sins which society 
pardons and passes by, with hardly a condemning 
voice, ere we blame him too harshly for what he may 
have done under this strong temptation. 

I need hardly dwell upon that other phase of this 
condition, where men, not by any social necessity, but 
by their own will and inclination, have become merely 
instruments of appetite. There are thousands who of 
their free choice and will have reduced themselves to 
be mere slaves of their appetites, who live for bread 
alone, who are mere slugs of animality, merely breath- 
ing and crawling upon the face of the earth; not 
living for bread even, but for that which might have 
been made bread, but which has been turned into 
pokon; living for sensual gratification, and for the 
coarsest material ends. Are you not inclined, when- 
ever you see a man like this, to say — Oh, man, heir of 
immortality, endowed by God with a spirit that shall 
go beyond the stars, made to live forever, made with 
capacities that might elevate you nearer and nearer to 
Him, nearer to His love, His purity, His goodness ; are 
you so base, so far aside from that great end which He 



IgJ. EXTEMPORANEOUS DI5COUESES. 

lias set before you, as to have become a mere slave of 
the appetite, a mere instrument for ministering to sen- 
sual gratification ? 

But sometimes man is hot a mere instrument for 
getting bread — not a mere instrument for meat and 
drink — but makes himself an instrument for that class 
of things which bread symbolizes and represents. 
Thus he may become a mere instrument of accumula- 
tion, and that not for an end, not for a good purpose, 
not for some ideal which he sets before himself, not to 
fulfill some noble plan and pattern of life, but merely 
for its own sake. He values it not for what it does for 
him, but for what it is in itself. How many men you 
see in this world who have become merely the pack- 
horses of their own possessions; who go through life 
the veriest slaves to that which they toil for, wasting 
their health and strength, and it may be their higher 
powers — even their consciences and souls — in the 
mere effort to accumulate ! How many men of this sort 
you see stumbling alon^ in life like a camel with his 
load ! In fact, you do not see the man himself — only 
the pack of his possessions on his back. He finds it 
hard work to squeeze through the needle's eye; and 
when he dies he is hardly missed; for that by which 
he was known— that of which he was the slave, and 
not the master — remains behind. He is not missed so 
long as his prominent characteristic is not gone. A 
man ou°:ht to live in such a wav — at least to have so 
much of a soul— that when he dies, whatever may be 



THE BREAD OF LIFE. Jg5 

his possessions, or his lack of them, he will at least be 
missed. It is a terrible thing for a man to live so that 
when he is dead he is not missed, and there is no real 
sorrow for him — no saying, "Here was a man that 
helped fill up the order of God's universe ; that touched 
some secret chord of the human heart that nobody else 
could touch ; a man for whom we shall mourn, and the 
like of whom we shall look for in vain." 

But a man that simply loads himself down with 
possessions,, of which he has no actual need, when he 
dies, his possessions remain, and he slips out of them as 
a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into 
which it has ensconced itself, into the grave, and is 
forgotten.. 

So, too, taking the bread standard as the exclusive 
standard of life, a man becomes a mere instrument in 
pursuit of popularity, of office, or any other worldly 
advantage, with a soul to let, and a self-serviceable 
conscience thrown in, like diplomatists that play all 
manner of variations upon one selfish string, slimy 
politicians who have wriggled through every kennel, 
and left their zig-zag trail upon most opposite measures 
and most inconsistent platforms. 

You perceive that in this condition of life, where a 
man lives for bread alone, he becomes a mere instru- 
ment, and is not an end in himself. He lives for some- 
thing out of himself — merely to get the means of living 
— for his daily bread, or for some interest which bread 
symbolizes and represents. The Christian theory, I 



Igg EXTEMPOBANEOFS DISCOURSES, 

repeat, is not asceticism. It does not teach tEat living 
for bread up to the demands of material necessity 
is wrong, but that living for bread alone, or any 
earthly good alone, becoming its tool, its slave, its in- 
strument, is a deep and dreadful error — is sin. 

Of course you see that out of this condition there 
come peculiar standards of measurement. You see that 
men who live in this condition have different standards 
from those vrho live in another condition of life. For 
to them a thing is valuable in proportion as it serves 
those material and worldly ends. Living for bread 
alone, they estimate everything by the bread standard. 
For instance, in reference to a great reform which pro- 
poses to benefit man, to remove a formidable evil, to 
strike at a prevailing sin, the question that occurs to 
that man at once is, "Won't it damage profit? won't 
it interfere with the interests of property P You can 
not reason with men who take such a standard as that ; 
for, as I have often taken occasion to say. it is not the 
intellect that needs to be convinced in any process of 
reasoning. ]\Ien are pretty much the same when they 
are looking from the same point of view — they are 
very much as their eyes see and their ears hear. It 
does not require great intellect or brain to see plain, 
palpable facts ; but marshal before a man a truth that 
strikes at his interest, and you can not make him see 
it, with all the logic you can link from the morning 
stars to the earth, because he has a different standard of 
valuation from yours. You may say, ; - Here is woe, 



THE BEE AD OF LIFE. ^87 

here is redness of eyes, here is sorrow." He replies, 
"Very well, but we have got great property inter- 
ests on the other side, and you must not damage 
these." 

He can not measure the value of a principle that 
affects his own personal selfish interest. He does riot 
value truth for what it may be in itself, but for its 
effects upon his interests. How many there are to 
whom religion itself is the merest sham and form ; 
whose attendance at church is merely in deference to 
the feeling of popularity, or a desire to appear respect- 
able, and maintain a good standing; who value no 
more God Almighty's truth, that is a salve for the 
soul, a light for the mind, a guide for the conscience, 
than the merest bauble in the world, but who play 
with it and use it the same as they would use anything 
else, for the promotion of their material interests alone. 
How many have made investments in profitable lies, 
with which they would not part for all the truth in the 
world, not knowing that no lie is profitable in its ulti- 
mate results ! 

By nothing do men differ so much as by their 
standards of valuation. In these the real man comes 
out. Here is one man who looks at a great picture, a 
fine work of art ; to him it is nothing but colored can- 
vas. He looks at a beautiful statue, and it is nothing 
but chiseled marble. He can not see why men admire 
such things, pay so much for them, and go so far to 
see them. He discovers nothing in them beyond the 



288 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

merely material aspect, because his standard of valua- 
tion is simply from that point of life which is bounded 
by the bread interest. 

Another man, in the commonest shell that is de- 
j)osited on the dry beach, or in the merest weed that 
grows out of the chink in the wall, finds scope for deep 
and interesting research. He discerns as much the 
glory of God in the miniature world revealed in a 
single drop of water, as in a great planet. One man 
is overawed by the solemn aspect of the mountain, and 
the glory of the forest waving with the breath of the 
summer breeze. Another wonders how many acres 
of land there are and how much timber in it. That is 
all the universe is to him. So the characters of men 
are revealed according to their standard of valuation ; 
and, I repeat, if a man's life is wholly down to the 
bread standard of life, he sees merely the material in- 
terests of this world. If he is a mere instrument, he 
values things only as they serve him as an instrument; 
but if he is an end, then he learns to value them as 
they serve him as an end. 

Let me then, my friends, urge upon you that other 
and higher life — that point of view in which a man 
lives not for bread alone, but for " every word that 
proceedeth out of the mouth of God" — not by bread, 
but by Him who creates the bread that sustains and 
nourishes us. "What was the temptation of Jesus 
Christ when he lived in that high life ? It was a tran- 
sient thing. Did he need bread ? Tou remember one 



THE B EE AD OF LIFE. 289 

time during his ministry, when his disciples had gone 
into one of the cities of Samaria to buy meat, he sat 
talking with the woman at the well, unfolding the 
high truths of the Gospel ; and when they came back 
and asked him to eat, he replied, " I have meat to eat 
that ye know not of." So with every good man ; he 
does not live merely by bread alone, but by that God 
from whom it comes. Such a man apprehends that he 
does not live by bread alone, even in regard to his lit- 
eral sustenance. Do we think of the bread alone when 
it is placed on our tables ? Are we not reminded from 
whence it comes — what wondrous mysteries have con- 
spired to bring it there — the fair sunlight that shone 
upon the soil — the heavenly dew that moistened the 
earth — the mysterious processes of nature that brought 
forth, "first the blade, then the ear, after that the full 
corn in the ear ?" Does man live by bread alone, or by 
Divine wisdom, power, and goodness, which conspire in 
the wondrous loom of nature to weave the result and 
form the agency by which we get that bread ? 

My friends, when a man rises into this higher con- 
dition of life, he comes to the conclusion that he is 
not a mere instrument, but that he is an end in. 
himself. I know the old catechism says, "Man's 
chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever;" 
and that is true. Everything that is contained in that 
catechism is not true, I think, but that is. Man is 
made to glorify God. How ? By becoming an end in 
himself. Just in proportion as he becomes unfolded 



]_90 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

and all his faculties harmonized, just in proportion 
as his higher nature takes its true place, and his soul 
becomes sanctified, redeemed, and transformed into a 
true life, just in that proportion is God glorified. 

God is glorious in everything he has made. His 
glory is revealed in the little blade of grass that 
begins to peep from underneath the winter ice ; in 
the planet that flames with splendor in the heavens ; 
but by nothing so much upon this earth as in man, 
a creature of intelligence, of immortal capacity, of 
ever-growing affections and powers ; and in the per- 
fection of man. in the full unfolding harmony and 
transfiguration of his nature, is God glorified. There- 
fore it is perfectly consistent to say that man is made 
for the glory of God, The first point to be attained 
with man as an end is to rise to the true conception 
of life. When he does this he has a different standard 
of value from that of the mere bread standard. The 
standard of value with him is whatever elevates and 
perfects his personality; not what he gets, not what 
he accumulates, not what only feeds one part of his 
nature, but what makes him great and good, strong 
and beautiful, and assimilates him to God and Christ. 
He stands in a different market with his wares, works 
for a higher end, and seeks to gain a more glorious re- 
sult. He thinks of utilities in a larger and nobler 
sense than other men. That which they call useful 
may be so to him ; but that which may be impracti- 
cable to them may be the most useful of all things to 



THE BEEAD OF LIFE. 191 

him. He values everything that comes from the 
month of God, and lives by it — that is, all things that 
God gives, not merely to the body, but to the soul. 
Whatever proceeds from the essence, glory, and per- 
fection of God, he values, and therefore whatever 
makes him richer in the perception of beauty, and 
gives him affinity with beauty, he values. 

Sometimes people go to a rich man's house and 
wonder that he pays so much money for a picture. 
The money they think might bring in interest or might 
be applied to purposes of utility, and they consider it 
a waste to expend five or ten thousand dollars for a 
work of art. Little do they imagine how that picture 
enriches and refines that man's soul, elevating it to a 
higher conception of all beauty ; how it enables him 
to understand why the swamp mists become festoons 
and upholsteries of glory before the setting sun; why 
the grass is green, the heavens blue, and the rolling 
waves of the sea are interlaced with threads of sun- 
light ; because, viewing them as proceeding out of the 
mouth of God, he comprehends them, and says, " The 
money that I have given for it, that could not make 
me richer; but the beauty it gives me does make me 
richer, because it perfects me, and helps form me for 
an end." 

Again, such a man values the true in the light of its 
truth, and not of its profit, and he would not give up 
that for anything else. The truth that proceeds out 
of the mouth of God he does not value as an end, 



192 



EXTEMP0KANE0US DISCOUBSES. 



because viewed in the estimate I have now taken; 
even truth is not an end, but a means. For what is 
the object of truth? It is that we may know more 
truth ; that we may become capable of comprehending 
truth; that we may be more loyal, more like God. I 
repeat, a man who takes this higher standard of life, 
values that which is true, and takes it as it comes 
out of the mouth of God. He does not take the 
mere word of man in all the perplexities of his rea- 
son, in all the darkness that falls upon his struggling 
soul ; but he says, " Let me know what God requires 
of me." 

Oh, how we do live upon traditions — upon the mere 
say-so of other people — what they think, what they 
believe — the current of popular conviction — instead of 
coming and taking the word out of the mouth of God ! 
God gives it to the soul in free inspiration; if we 
open the windows of the soul to it, down will come 
the rain, and in will flow the sunshine. Oh, man, if 
you will only stand in a proper posture, God will 
give you His truth. Come to Him, and not to human 
creeds. Oh, forlorn, darkened spirit, distracted by hu- 
man opinions, and what learned men say ; cramped by 
dark theology ; troubled by gloomy dogmas ; hold on 
to the truth that comes from the word of God, and by 
that you shall live, and not by bread alone. 

Moreover, a man who stands in this higher life, and 
takes this standard for his estimate, values the good in 
and for itself alone. He values it as it allies him to 



THE BKEAD OF LIFE. ^gg 

God, as it makes him one with Christ and the Father. 
Oh, how that sentence is set forth and emphasized in 
the New Testament, which says, " That they may be 
one as we are one — one with me, as I am one with 
the Father !" That is the great end of man's being — ■ 
to pass upward in the essential life of goodness, to the 
life that is exemplified in Jesus Christ. The man who 
has the true standard of action, values that more than 
anything else ; and all things that mar that good, or 
hinder its attainment, are to him most to be dreaded 
and despised. It is not good or evil fortune ; it is not 
sickness or health ; it is not popularity or scorn that he 
cares for; but it is, that he may become good — one 
with God in goodness, one in that essential love that 
flowed in every artery of Jesus Christ. 

Why should we not apprehend religion as intended 
to lead us to this great result — its real end and object 
— to make us one with God and one with Christ? 
Why should we not look upon it also as teaching us 
the real meaning of all retribution and of all reward ? 
How many people are afraid of hell, afraid of punish- 
ment, afraid of vindictive, crushing wrath, sinking 
them lower and lower down in infamy, sorrow, and 
pain — not afraid of evil! They would roll that as a 
sweet morsel under their tongues, were it not for the 
penalty that clings to it and hedges it round. They 
have not taken the true standard of the higher life. 
The man who looks at evil and estimates it by the true 
standard, sees that in itself it is to be dreaded. 

9 



194: EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

The awfulness of sin, the terribleness of being alienated 
from God, is what he dreads. " Oh," he says, " the 
darkest corner of the universe for me is heaven if God 
is with me, for his presence will make that darkness 
brighter than day ; but heaven, as it is painted, with 
its turrets of gold, its crystal battlements, its clear, flow- 
ing river — not that would be the place for me, alien- 
ated from the spirit of God and from Jesus Christ. 
Give me goodness only; let me live in that; let me 
fall back upon that, and whatever may occur to me, I 
am strong and free in the possession of that goodness." 
Thus, you see, my friends, there are very different 
standards of estimating what is beautiful, true, and 
good. This is the apprehension of a man that lives on 
the plane of the higher life, who does not live by bread 
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God. 

Having indicated these two kinds of life, I have 
sufficiently indicated the point of the most fearful 
temptations that occur in life. They are when man is 
tempted to sacrifice the interests of the higher life to 
the claims of the lower. I have shown you at the com- 
mencement how they are compatible — how the lower 
has its claims, and must be attended to ; how, out of 
the necessities of the lower life, some of the greatest 
benefits and blessings spring. But I say, when the 
lower life presents one claim, and the higher another ; 
when it is bread or truth ; when it is worldly interest 
or goodness ; when it is meanness or beauty ; when it 



THE BSE AD OF LIFE. J95 

is wrong or right — then can any man really hesitate to 
decide ? Your decision will cost you fortune ; what 
then ? It brings you nearer to God. It will cost you 
pi^erty ; what then ? It makes you one with Christ. 
Oh, my friends, cling to the good, the true, the beauti- 
ful, molded, transfigured, and idealized in the spirit of 
Jesus Christ; take that as your standard, and make it 
the great element of your souls, that you may be one 
with God and Christ. And when temptation comes 
— when it says, "Live for the appetite, liYe for this 
world, liYe for the passing moment, liYe for selfish 
ends, liYe with false aims or mean standards," oh, 
then, call up the image of Him who stood alone in the 
wilderness, with the dark shadows around him, with 
the fearful conflict raging within and without, and 
who, in the calm majesty of his spirit, said, "Man 
shall not liYe by bread alone, but by eYery word that 
proceedeth out of the mouth of God." 

Oh, martyr for righteousness ! oh, sufferer for con- 
science' sake ! oh, victim of temptation ! alternating 
between right and wrong, take these strong words, let 
them be a trumpet-peal in your ear, uplifting your 
soul as on angels 5 wino's, " Man shall not liYe bY bread 
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God." 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 



Like-wise. I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels 
of G-od over one sinner that repenteth. — Luke xv, 10, 

THIS assurance, coming from the lips of Jesus him- 
self, exhibits Christianity, both in its spirit and 
in its grandeur. As yon will remember, these words 
were spoken in reply to certain self-righteous formal- 
ists who shrunk with horror from any association with 
publicans and sinners, and who marveled that one who 
professed to be a divine teacher should sit down and 
eat with them. To these Scribes and Pharisees our 
Saviour made known the truth, that the great purpose 
for which he came was to seek and to save the lost. 
He showed them that throughout the universe there 
were no objects of more solicitude than these fallen 
and guilty ones, and that their repentance and restora- 
tion was the cause of great and heavenly joy. 

Now I do not understand Christ to say — no one can 
understand him to say — that God takes more absolute 
delight in a sinner than in a saint. Nor does Jesus 
at all encourage the strange conceit that the wandering 
prodigal is more an object of divine favor than one 



198 



EXTEMPOKANEOUS DISCOUESES. 



who keeps within the bounds of reverent love and 
service. It seems to me that there is one view which 
may settle any confusion of thought in this matter, 
and that is merely the question, whether it is better to 
sin than not to sin ? It is a fact that there is no man 
without sin ; there is no man who stands absolutely in 
that class of pure and perfect beings upon this earth 
who might be supposed to be aggrieved by any de- 
monstration of love toward the returning sinner. 
These Scribes and Pharisees, however, were taken 
up upon their own assumption ; even supposing them 
to be as righteous as they claimed to be, w T as the 
course of the Saviour's argument, still there was this 
love and care for the repentant sinner. But in reality 
they were worse sinners than the prodigal. So, practi- 
cally, there can be no confusion in regard to the matter. 
And the question really is, whether it is better to sin 
than not to sin, which hardly needs an answer. And 
I repeat, therefore, Christ does not encourage the con- 
ceit that God loves less those who keep near him in 
reverent faith and service, because he receives and 
cares for the wandering or returning prodigal. 

Bat the fact which Jesus teaches here is that glad- 
ness and surprise, that joy and gratified affection, w T ith 
which love welcomes at last its alienated but unsur- 
rendered objects. In one word, my friends, our 
Saviour, in the passage before us, shows the identity 
of the great sentiment of love in heaven and upon 
earth, in the depths of divine love and in the heart of 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. ^QQ 

man. He appeals to those affections which are most 
profoundly interwoven in our being. He exhibits the 
spirit and power of the Gospel as not above or foreign 
to the elements of our own consciousness, but inti- 
mately allied to it. He based this appeal upon that 
which can be demonstrated from the most familiar 
and common experience. Take any family circle — 
and, alas, how many there are ! — take any family circle 
from which one self-deluded member has gone forth, 
has gone astray, has gone, the rest know not whither ; 
tossed upon some wave of desperate fortune, or fettered 
in the consequences of his own transgressions ; thrown 
somewhere in this wide world, finding conditions of 
existence somehow, the Omniscient alone knows how. 
How many such there are, not in some far-off country, 
upon some desolate island, or some rugged shore, but 
right here in the midst of this great city, wrecked 
among its temptations, drawn down in its whirlpool of 
sin and shame ! yes, how many such are there even in 
the midst of its luxuries and splendor, groveling in 
the meanest conditions of sensuality, feeding upon 
husks, and consorting with swine ! How many a stray 
sheep is there that has wandered far from its fold! 
how many a lost piece of silver, buried among the rub- 
bish, but belonging still to the great treasury, upon 
whose dim disk you may yet trace the Maker's image 
and superscription ! How little we know, how little 
the multitude knows or cares about these lost ones ! 
how little they know or care for themselves, not 



200 EXTEMPOE ANE01TS DISCOUESES. 

having yet come to themselves ! Decked it may be in 
some outward drapery or harlot tinsel, living in 
abomination, drunk with folly, fascinated with ruin, 
yet there are those who know and care for them in 
some far-off home nestling among the hills, around 
which the new spring is beginning to wreathe its 
beauty, but in which there buds no springing joy, 
because one is not there, has gone astray, is worse 
than dead. There is some mother there, watching 
and praying, hoping against hope, but never losing 
out of her mind, never casting out of her heart that 
child's face which once laid upon her bosom, and the 
life and soul which unfolded under her tender care. 
There is some father there, whose stern face is only 
the thin mask of a broken spirit, and whose brief 
words rise from the depths of an aching solitude. 
They know and care for this poor outcast, this 
wretched wandering sheep out in the wilderness, amid 
the perils of an inhospitable world. ]STow suppose 
that on this very day that prodigal should return ; 
suppose that at this hour that lonely, sorrowing 
mother should be surprised with a glad joy, and 
that father should see the poor shattered child that 
has gone out from his love, but has never been beyond 
its exercise, or beyond his thought — suppose he should 
see him reeling back to him in his weakness, in his 
penitence, in his utter abasement, I ask you, could the 
earth — I might say, could all heaven — restrain the burst 
of joy that would sweep away all considerations of the 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 201 

long years of guilt, of the long neglect and shame? 
Would they not all be swept away before the rising 
force of that mighty tide of surprise and joy? It is in 
our nature, it is among its necessities — not merely its 
possibilities, but its necessities — -that all the force of the 
affection of that father's and that mother's heart should 
rally in behalf of the alien and outcast. And would 
there be injustice and unfaithfulness toward those who 
have remained within the inclosure of obedient love 
and service ? Is love of that nature, that if you give to 
one you take from another ? No, my friends, love is 
of that nature that it is exhausted not at all, however 
much it is given to another ; but it expands, in- 
creases, and unfolds according to the greatness of its 
nature. There would be no injustice to those who 
*emain, no lack of love, no altering of affection. But 
mly the love that has been secreted through long days 
and years of sorrow, of loss, of anguish, that love 
would overflow to welcome back the prodigal. 

Now this I take to be the force of our Saviour's 
declaration in the text, that it is in the nature of love 
so to cling to its objects, so to care for them, so to claim 
them, that when they do return it overflows all barriers, 
it breaks down all other considerations, it shows itself 
in a more strange and manifest joy than it does for those 
who are nearer to it, and who remain constantly under 
the dominion and influence of loyal obedience and af- 
fection. Hundreds and thousands there are in this very 
city who, however far they wander, however deeply 

9* 



202 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

they sink, may still feel, perhaps do feel, that there is 
a love and care for them upon this earth that can never 
be changed, that can never be exhausted. But even 
if there is no such love and care for them upon this 
earth, they may feel that however forsaken of human 
regard, there is One who knows and loves them, that 
they belong to the great family of souls, that they are 
missed and looked for with a solicitude that fills all 
heaven. As in the family circle, the return of the wan- 
derer, his penitent and willing return, is received with 
such a burst of gladness, so the return of these wan- 
derers to truth and holiness and to God, fills all heaven 
with bliss, and thrills with joy angelic hearts. This 
is the statement of Jesus Christ in the passage before 
us. And what I wish you especially to consider, is 
that this is the very spirit of the whole Gospel of the 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

We may speculate about difficulties ; we may 
adjust the claims of these and those in what way we 
choose; I repeat, this is the essence of the Gospel. 
The essence of the Gospel is not dogma ; it is not the 
sharp statement of any intellectual truth. I do not 
deny that there are great truths and great doctrines in 
it. But that is not the point ; I say that the essence 
of the Gospel, its great peculiarity, is not in any state- 
ment of God's nature or of man's nature, of the 
Trinity, of the unity, of human perfectibility, of total 
depravity. The essence of the Gospel is in its spirit 
of restoring, of long suffering, of inexhaustible love, 



JOT OF THE ANGELS. 



203 



claiming its objects, waiting fcr them and welcoming 
them at the last. 

Bat let me say farther, under this head, that by the 
light of this central love and compassion we should 
interpret the different parts as well as the grand whole 
of the Gospel. Xow yon may take texts out of the 
Bible, and yon can prove any doctrine that has ever 
passed muster under the name of Christianity. By a 
single text you may prove transubstantiation, you 
may prove the Trinity, or the unity, or total deprav- 
ity. Taking simply the textual letter alone, you 
may prove eternal damnation, or universal salvation ; 
you may prove anything by a single text. But that 
is not the way to interpret the Gospel or the Bible. 
Deeper than the interpretations you get out of 
your dictionaries, Hebrew or Greek, is the spirit 
with which you are to come to interpret the New 
Testament, if you would know its radical meaning, 
its real essence. And yet what are our sects built 
and founded upon? Upon isolated texts, like forts. 
They take one text and crowd it through to its 
extreme meaning, without paying any regard to its 
ultimate meaning in connection with the body and 
substance of the Gospel. The Roman Catholic takes 
the text, u Take, eat, this is my body," and builds up 
the stupendous dogma of transubstantiation. The 
Baptist takes a literal meaning of the word " baptize," 
and builds up his close-hedged communion, denying 
all Christianity that does not come through that par- 



204 EXTEMPOE ANEOTTS DISCOURSES. 

ticular mode of baptism. Another man sees the 
phrase " everlasting punishment/' and without regard 
to the great fact that the word " eternal" is to be inter- 
preted by the subject with which it is connected — if 
it is " the eternal hills," they can not be as enduring 
as "the eternal God;" if it is "the eternal priesthood 
of Aaron," it can not mean as much as, " the eternal 
kingdom of Christ" — he takes that text, alone, by 
itself, and crowds it to its extreme literal meaning, and 
upon that builds up the dark, crushing, and terrible 
dogma of eternal damnation. For that stands simply 
upon the strict interpretation of words ; the human 
heart rejects it, the human reason denies it; but the 
sharp textualist thrusts forward the phrase " everlasting 
punishment," and upon that builds up his dogma. 
The Universalist takes the word " all" and " saved," 
clinging to them, perhaps, with just as much bigotry 
as the Presbyterian or the Catholic does to his words, 
and upon them founds his belief of the ultimate res- 
toration and redemption of the whole human family. 

I repeat, this is not the way in which we are to inter- 
pret the New Testament. We are to come to the IsTew 
Testament in its deep essence and purpose. All the 
sayings of Jesus Christ are to be interpreted in har- 
mony with that spirit ; we must take the deep essence 
and substance of the Gospel. We are to receive what 
grows out of that — what most accords with its general 
sentiment. And I say what most accords with the 
general sentiment of the Gospel, with the deep spirit 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 



205 



and substance of the Gospel, is this simple doctrine, 
that God cares for the sinner, for the vilest and most 
abandoned sinner who is upon earth. In a mother's 
heart there is a love that can not be altered and ex- 
hausted, and that will claim that abandoned sinner 
when he comes back. So in the Infinite bosom, and in 
the bosoms of all heavenly beings, there exists the same 
love ; the spirit that sent Jesus Christ on earth is that 
spirit ; the purpose of Christ's mission is to declare 
that spirit. That is the peculiarity of the Gospel over 
and above evervthino- else. Precisely where man's 

J O t/ 

faith falls and man's hope falters, is it that the Gospel 
becomes clear and strong. It is not the announcement 
of the doctrine of evil to the sinner and good to the 
saint. That doctrine might stand upon any basis, even 
the basis of worldly morality. But it is the announce- 
ment of the doctrine of a good that will forgive the 
sinner, that will watch upon its objects, wait upon 
them, and welcome them at last — that is the sublime 
originality, that is the practical power of the Gospel. 
And this sympathy is a sympathy that prevails among 
the purest and best beings of the universe ; that is the 
point. It is not in proportion as a man is a sinner 
that he sympathizes with the sinner, but in proportion 
as a being is pure and unsullied is there a sympathy 
for the sinner which is deep and lasting. Not for the 
sin ; there is the mistake, there is the great distinction. 
There is no sympathy in God for the sin, but for the 
sinner. Deeper than that is the doctrine, that in pro- 



206 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

portion to the grandeur and the largeness of a nature, 
in that proportion is there this deep and overflowing 
sympathy. 

There is a great meaning in the words of the 
Apostle Paul, when he speaks of the family on earth 
and in heaven. ISTow, my friends, just think what con- 
ceptions of heaven have existed, and do still exist. 
With most persons, heaven is at best merely a mate- 
rial condition — a mere transfer, a mere copy, a mere 
photograph of this world, touched up in gold, and 
thrust the other side of the grave. It is simply crystal 
battlements and golden streets, all the material enjoy- 
ments of this world on a higher scale, only more pro- 
longed and lofty in degree ; or, if not so, it is merely a 
negative state. The conception of heaven, in the 
minds of some, of most persons, is the conception of a 
condition where no sin can enter, where no un clean- 
ness prevails. When this statement is exhausted, 
their idea of heaven is exhausted. It seems to be a 
very monotonous place, hardly so pleasant as the 
one which was mentioned as the idea of the old lady 
who thought of heaven as a place where she would 
always sit in a clean, white apron and sing psalms. 
With a great many it is merely a place of blank inac- 
tion, of stagnation, marked simply by the exclusion of 
all active effort, of anything like live sympathy. Or if 
anything else has entered into the thoughts and expec- 
tations of men, it is terrible to see what it is. It has 
been selfishness that has entered the minds of a great 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 207 

many people, who think of heaven as a place where 
they can go, and where they will say, " We are saved — 
glory to God ; he has rescued us from danger ; he has 
lifted us above the roaring waves, he has placed our feet 
upon the rock ; we are safe." And then there is the 
elder brother's feeling, who looks out upon the prodigal 
with disgust and hatred. That is the feeling with 
which a great many think they are to exist in heaven, 
looking out with disgust and hatred upon those who 
are excluded. Nay, more than this ; it has been held 
by the clearest intellect — in some respects, by the 
sharpest mind that this country has produced — that 
those in heaven would look down in perfect joy upon 
the torments of those who are excluded, having their 
felicity heightened, and the chords of their harps 
strung to higher music, by considering the pain and 
woe of those who may be among the lost. 

It is not necessary for me to say that that is not the 
spirit represented by this passage. If Jesus Christ 
has given us — as I believe he has here — an epitome 
of the Gospel, there is no such spirit represented in 
that passage. There is nothing like that running 
through the deep currents of the K"ew Testament. 
If anything is made clear, it is that the best af- 
fections of this earth are not changed when they are 
translated to heaven. Tet it has been held that they 
will be changed, and indeed they must be, if this feel- 
ing should enter there, if the time should ever come 
when the father could look upon the exile and exclu- 



208 EXTEMPOKANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

sion of his son with joy, or even with apathy ; our affec- 
tions must be changed, if that can happen. If we have 
a right to reason upon the subject, if we know any- 
thing, if our data are not all baseless, if we are not liv- 
ing in the light of a mere delusion, then our affections 
must be changed, and for the worse, if ever these best 
emotions of the human heart, which on this earth must 
secrete their love for the prodigal, and overflow with 
love upon his return — if ever these can be so changed 
that we can regard the condition of him, who is ex- 
cluded and shut out, with apathy, and even with joy, 
that is not the doctrine taught in the fifteenth chapter 
of the Gospel according to St. Luke. You may bring 
forward all the texts you please — you may harp upon 
the phraseology that seems to teach the contrary — : 
you may endeavor, by the most subtile reasoning, to 
show that man's will shall be brought into acqui- 
escence to God's law, and say that man will have such 
a view of the divine glory in the punishment of sin- 
ners, that he will change his ideas — you may arrange 
all this as you will, I repeat that that doctrine is not 
the doctrine of the fifteenth chapter of St. Luke. 
The doctrine there taught is that the best affections 
of earth are the affections of heaven, only enlarged, 
only nobler, only broader and deeper in their sympa- 
thies ; that is the way to look at and to contemplate 
heaven. The good man is not changed. He is not 
called upon to bind up any wounds — to stoop over 
any fallen and bruised one. Yet the great sentiment 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 209 

of philanthropy in Howard is expanded out to some 
nobler object, still going onward. The noble, and 
the good, and the holy — the lovers of their fellow-man 
— find higher objects of love and nobler spheres of 
action. And the affections in the mother's and 
father's heart work with more diligence — yes, so far as 
as I can know, so far as yon can know — they work 
for all the objects of those affections, even when they 
have left this earth — work with a better apparatus of 
spiritual influence and power, with an affection which 
is measured by no bounds of time and sense, and 
with results which, as I look npon them, must, in the 
end, be sure. 

But at the same time while thus we look npon this 
matter — while we feel that the doctrine of the passage 
set before us is one of yearning and nnending love, 
even for the guilty — that on earth or in heaven it is 
the same — that it never changes, but only broadens 
and deepens— while thus it presents us the fact that 
there is no barrier on the side of heaven to man's 
salvation — it still leaves untouched the tremendous 
responsibility of individual will and action. And 
though believing as I do, that the upshot and result 
must be final good for all, I can not hold to that up- 
shot of final good as coming by any desecration of 
man's personality. If I could believe that, with all 
these influences brought to bear upon him, man could 
still hold on to perverse, selfish sin, then I could 
believe in endless sin. I believe God poised man 



21Q EXTEMP0E AXE0US DISCOUESES. 

upon free action, as lie lias poised the planets, and 
that all the good that comes to man must come, not 
from external pressure, but from his own choice, in- 
fluenced perhaps by that pressure. Therefore I say 
that there is no barrier on the side of heaven. Here 
stands man, untouched in his freedom and personality, 
moving onward to a wise and holy result, in perfect 
consistency with that freedom and personality. This, 
then, I believe to be the spirit of the Gospel, and that 
whatever stands seemingly opposed to it may be rec- 
onciled; and I believe that deeper and deeper runs 
the spirit of everlasting love. It runs all through the 
teachings of Jesus. 

But these remarks lead me to consider the second 
point in the text. I said the passage before us ex- 
hibits not only the spirit, but the grandeur of Chris- 
tianity. "What its spirit is I have just been endeavor- 
ing to show. I say, then, in the first place, consider 
its grandeur as illustrated in the announcement of 
Jesus. The declaration in the text reveals two things 
— the nature of man and his spiritual relations. It 
exhibits man as a living soul, and as a member of 
the great family of souls. It strips away all conven- 
tionality from him. Christianity is primal democracy, 
lifted far above anything that either pro or con bears 
that name in our day as a party distinction. It is 
the great doctrine of man higher than his condi- 
tions, nobler than any material good. 

Why ? Because he is a living soul ; because within 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 211 

him there are deathless powers ; because he is allied 
to God by a nature that no other being on this earth 
bears, and faculties that no other creature on this foot- 
stool possesses. That is the great announcement — the 
key-note of Christianity — the source of its consolation 
and power. 

And this is the source of its great achievement in 
modern civilization. Subtile theorists ask what Chris- 
tianity has done for the progress of man. They point 
to science as working out human progress in its dis- 
coveries of truth, its uses of fact, and its adaptation of 
them to certain purposes of utility. They say man 
advances just in proportion as he gains knowledge — 
just according to the sum of human intelligence — 
and that Christianity, as a moral force, has nothing to 
do with that advancement. On the contrary, I believe 
that in this one element alone Christianity has done 
more for advancement than all that science has dis- 
covered and achieved — in the simple statement of the 
spiritual nature and immortal destiny of every man — 
in bidding you behold in black and white, rich and 
poor, high and low, a deathless and priceless soul. 
Christianity has thus sown the seeds of all progress, laid 
the foundation of all truth in government, and of all 
righteousness in society. It has been the master-key 
to all the grand efforts that man has made to be 
delivered from bondage, from oppression, from social 
wrong. It is the soul cf liberty; it is the oriflamme 
that leads the hosts of humanity forward from effort 



212 EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES. 

to effort, to higher and higher social attainments. If 
you would get at the core of all great efforts ; if you 
would know the trompet-note in Luther's reformation ; 
if tou would feel the power that thunders through 
the printing-presses : if you would sound the deepest 
strains of the Puritan's hymn ; if you would know 
what it was that inspired the patriots of the American 
revolution ; what it is that glorifies the Declaration of 
Independence, that gives it a name to live, disgraced 
foully as it is in our action ; it is simply the doctrine 
of the worth of every man in the possession of a 
spiritual and deathless nature. This is what Christi- 
anity has contributed to civilization and progress ; it 
is the spring of all the noble efforts of all time. 

In the next place, it reveals the relations of man to 
the whole spiritual universe — his relationship to all 
spiritual beings. TThat a grandeur there is in the 
science of astronomy, that reveals the relations of our 
world to others — of vast systems to the illimitable 
scheme of things ! "What a spectacle is presented when 
a man first takes up the telescope, and sees amid what 
myriad of orbs this little dim planet is wheeling ! and 
not only that, but when he recognizes the order that 
controls all these worlds, and how all things are linked 
together by one harmonious chain of sympathy, moved 
in order, obedient to one great law, which is but the 
express fiat of one intelligent mind ! That is a most 
overwhelming, as it is a most thrilling and glorious view 
of things. But. after al] , it is the material side of things ; 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 213 

and when you take that view alone, it must alarm you, 
because man shrinks back with awe and with fear when 
he asks, " What am I in the midst of all this immensity ? 
What am I, considered as a material being, compared 
with the universe, but a speck of planet-dust that lies 
on the verge of the firmament ? I am nothing. I am 
here to-day, I am gone to-morrow." The mere revela- 
tion of science alone, therefore, I repeat, is enough to 
crush us. If we take only the material view of things, 
man is but a little breathing mechanism of to-day, 
and to-morrow he is swept away like a speck from a 
revolving wheel. 

But what does Christianity do ? It does not reverse 
this exactly, but it moves up to a higher view of 
things ; it turns the spiritual side of facts upon us. In 
the interpretation of our spiritual nature by Christianity 
man sees that, little creature as he is in the material 
sense, viewed as a spirit he is linked to systems and hie- 
rarchies of beings, of which these orbs, and planets, 
and systems are merely vehicles and symbols ; that 
he is connected with all blessed intelligences, with all 
intellectual and all moral beings throughout the uni- 
verse. That these outward symbols of things have 
their significance only in the interpretation of spiritual 
purposes. They stand merely as vehicles and symbols 
of spiritual facts. Man, degraded as he may be, and 
weak as he is, is inalienably linked with spiritual 
realities. 

Thus you see in this fact Christianity is a necessary 



214: EXTEMPOEANEOUS DISCOUESES. 

complement to science. It is necessary that we should 
take Christianity to interpret men, and to interpret 
life. If we take the scientific view alone, without 
Christianity, it would be appalling. Talk as you 
please of the glory of science, and the splendor of 
its revelations, the moment you begin to consult the 
fact of your own personal destiny, and ask what is 
your own individual significance in the universe, if 
you have nothing but the mere revelation of science, 
it would crush you. Therefore I say that, as a com- 
plement to the revelations of science, you need the 
spiritual revelation of Christianity. 

Some people talk of believing only what they can 
see — what they can handle — what can be made evi- 
dent to some of their senses. They say, " I will be- 
lieve in a thing only when I can see it, or when I can 
touch it." They are like Thomas, who would not be- 
lieve in our Saviour's resurrection until he had thrust 
his hands into the wounds in his side. Some men 
who believe in Spiritualism are of this class; they 
will not believe in it without material and physical 
demonstration. Spiritual truth can only come to 
them — so to speak — by a trepanning of the skull — by 
physical manifestation. IsTow true spirituality is found 
in the intuitions of the soul — in the secret whisperings 
that the martyr hears when he is ready to change 
earth for heaven — in the chambers of the saint's 
mind, when all without is dark. In the intuitive con- 
viction and consciousness is the true basis of all spirit- 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 215 

uality — not in the material demonstration; and this 
desire to realize things by the senses is the actual 
source of all the skepticism that questions the claim 
of Christianity. Men all admit that Christianity is a 
glorious system, and that Christ was a blessed teacher. 
They compliment him and lift him up on the whole 
a little above Seneca and Plato. They acknowledge 
the beautiful manifestations of moral excellence in 
him ; they admire the Sermon on the Mount ; but 
they do not know about these spiritual and super- 
sensual things ; they believe only in that which they 
can see and handle. 

What kind of a world is it, if we believe only to 
that extent ? How much can you see and handle, oh, 
skeptic ? What is it you see, oh, sharp philosopher ? 
Do you see matter ? Not at all ; you only see certain 
properties and phenomena of matter interpreted to 
you, not through your senses, but through your con- 
sciousness. And even in regard to matter itself, what 
is it? It is not light, it is not heat, it is not color, it is 
not extension; these are mere properties. No man 
ever saw matter. What do you see? Light? No, 
you do not ; you only see certain phenomena of light. 
The skeptic will believe only in what he can see, and 
yet believes in matter that he can not see, but which 
is interpreted only by his spiritual consciousness. 
Will you believe only that which comes within the 
limits of your knowledge ? How do you know you 
have the faculties to apprehend all knowledge? Do 



21Q EXTEMPORANEOUS DISCOURSES, 

we believe the universe lias only this phase of truth, 
which it turns to our faculties ? There may be five 
hundred or five thousand expressions of truth, and we 
see only five of them. Give to man a sixth sense, 
and the consequences that accompany it, and he will 
see more than he did before. Give him a hundred 
portals of communication, and he will see a hundred 
things that he does not see now. 

"Will you limit all truth to what you know ? That 
is the great question that Christianity presses upon us. 
It bids us look within at our own souls — its wants, 
needs, demands, and claims — its hunger and thirst for 
righteousness — its yearning for God. Even in our 
wildest and strangest wanderings it bids us look 
within, and it answers and supplies the spiritual de- 
mands, just as science answers the sensuous. I am 
just as sure of spiritual things through the faculties 
of my soul, as interpreted by Christianity, as ever 
3S~ewton or Humboldt were sure of material things 
through the faculties of the brain and senses, inter- 
preted by science. Skepticism stands on no basis at 
all, only as it stands on that of the senses, and they 
themselves are verified in their last result by conscious- 
ness alone. 

Christianity, therefore, I repeat, is the complement 
of scientific truth in the spiritual facts it reveals to 
us; and nothing is more grand than man's relation to 
spiritual beings — than the fact that the universe is 
filled up with blessed intelligences. I do not need to 



JOT OF THE ANGELS. 217 

see them, or hear them, to be convinced of this fact ; 
I know by surer sight than the eye, by more certain 
hearing than the ear, that they exist ; I know it by my 
vital consciousness of a God and of a heaven. And 
Christianity interprets that fact. It shows man, poor, 
wretched, vile as he may be, linked with these in- 
numerable relations. 

And what else does it show ? It shows identity of 
nature in all spiritual things on earth and in heaven. 
Oh, if you could tear all the Bible in strips, but leave 
this one savins; of Christ, what mighty truth and con- 
solation there would be in it ! "There is joy in heaven 
over one sinner that repenteth." How much that re- 
veals to us — lets in upon us. J oy in heaven ! Then 
there are beings in heaven capable of joy, just like 
ourselves — beings in sympathy with us. Joy in 
heaven! Oh, forlorn and wayward brother! you are 
despised of men. and scorned, and perhaps feel that you 
ought to be ; you have sinned vilely and grossly ; but 
do you know what you are ? There might be joy not 
only in that earthly home that nestles among the hills 
where your poor mother is praying for you to-day, but 
also great joy in heaven. What a revelation of an 
identity of nature — of a celestial sympathy ! 

Moreover, there is not only sympathy, but there is 
solicitude there. God is anxious for your return. 
He will not violate your personality or your freedom. 
He loves you, based as your welfare is upon your own 
choice and responsibility, and he pours round you in- 

*0 



218 EXTEMPOBANEOUS DISCOUKSES. 

finite means to bring yon back to him. It is for yon, 
then, O man — it is for yon, it seems, in the last result, 
to understand and appreciate this spiritual nature of 
yours. That is the great thing. Men do not know their 
own souls — they do not know the value of them. They 
need to be brought to appreciate themselves, as God and 
all holy beings appreciate them. How much there is to 
impress you with your soul's importance — to arouse and 
inspire you to holy life and action ! Spiritual solici- 
tude for you ! For, as I said before, the larger the na- 
ture, the larger the love. Little, mean natures are un- 
charitable natures. Find a man that is doubtful as to 
the virtue of his fellow-men, and you may be quite sure 
that he is a mean man himself. The man that al- 
ways has a hopeless, sarcastic sneer for his fellow-man, 
who is in perpetual fear that he will be cheated by 
them — look out for that man. But the man that hopes 
or trusts, though none sees the evil more keenly than 
he ; the man who sees something brighter than the 
sin; who sees the light shining around all, hope 
around all — that man has a noble nature, a larger and 
more persistent love. Thank God, there is a divine 
solicitude for us. God seeks for us as a shepherd seeks 
for the lost sheep in the wilderness, or as a woman seeks 
for the lost piece of silver ; and with that sympathy 
are conjoined all that worship around the throne. 

Do you want to know where you will find the 
clearest and most practical expression of that solici- 
tude ? It is in the cross of Jesus Christ. That word 



JOY OF THE ANGELS. 219 

is used vaguely. Sometimes people talk about 
preaching the doctrine of the Cross. Do they know 
what the real doctrine of the Cross is ? It is the ex- 
pression of this divine solicitude — the very persistence 
of the divine love in behalf of the sinner. Preach that, 
believe that, trust in that, listen to the appeal of that, be 
moved by assurance of that. Be transfigured in your 
own heart by the same loving and self-sacrificing spirit. 

There is a downward joy and an upward joy in -the 
world. The worst trait in wickedness, the worst mani- 
festation of a bad spirit, is joy in the fall of another — 
joy when sin prevails — joy when a brother trips and 
stumbles into ruin. Do you remember that terrible 
but magnificent passage in one of the chapters of Isaiah, 
where the prophet addresses the king of Babylon, and 
says : " Hell from beneath is moved for thee, to meet 
thee at thy coming. It stirreth up the dead for thee, 
even all the chief ones of the earth ; it hath raised 
up from their thrones all the kings of the nations. 
All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou be- 
come weak as we ? Art thou become like unto us ?" 
That is the way bad men feel when a man has lived 
twenty or thirty years without doing anything wrong, 
and then falls. " Aha !" they say, " thou hast become 
like one of us at last." So the libertine, who has 
tempted a woman to fall, says to her, " You are de- 
based now." That is the feeling of men who have 
gone far in sin, when they put the glass to your lips 
and succeed in leading you into vice. " It is no use 



220 EXTEilPOEANEOUS DISOOUESES. 

now ; you are down." Such a joy as that, my friends, 
is hellish and abominable; it is one of the darkest 
problems in the universe ; it is the grandest embodi- 
ment of the devil that I know of. There is only one 
thing that is almost as bad, and that is the spirit of the 
eldest son in the parable, who believes he is going to 
heaven because he has worked for it all his life, and 
nobody else has any right to go there who has not 
worked as hard as he has. Or that of the Scribes and 
Pharisees, who can not bear the idea that God in some 
way will have mercy upon all — that he would bring 
all (not in their sins, but out of them — remember 
that) into his kingdom at last — that in some way he 
will break the rocky heart — that he will watch from 
the eternal heaven, wait and put forth influences until 
they all come at last into his kingdom. The Scribes 
and Pharisees can not like that ; they have lived on 
earth for the purpose of being happy in heaven. 
Such a spirit is near akin to that which says to the 
fallen, " You have become like one of us." That is a 
downward joy. There is an upward joy that blessed 
spirits feel when another spirit becomes blessed. It is 
the joy of redeemed souls when others have become 
redeemed. It is the joy of those who have fought the 
good fight and achieved the victory, when others come 
drenched, as it may be, with the blood of their wounds, 
but saved and delivered. It is a joy that flows from 
earth to heaven. As there is light in the morning 
that goes shimmering up the clear upper sky, so there 



OT OF THE ANGELS. 221 

is a light that goes shimmering up to the white robes 
of the blessed, making their crowns brighter, wheil the 
faces of the penitent are upturned in prayer. As 
when the breath of the summer air begins to stir the 
leaves of the forest, they all shiver and lift themselves 
with rejoicing, so when the soul of the penitent begins 
to move, when the guilty heart turns from sin to 
Christ, there goes forth a breath, an impulse, higher 
and higher, deeper and deeper, stronger and stronger, 
until it becomes a sweet hallelujah sweeping all round 
the courts of heaven. That is the upward joy 

Now, oh, man, how do you stand ? All heaven 
sympathizing for you — God solicitous for you, and yon 
holding on to your sin ! Are you not ashamed of it ? 
Is it not strange that you will indulge in any sin? 
For it is not for the outcast merely— the gross prodigal 
— that he is solicitous, but for all sinners. You have 
a bosom sin — a bad practice — a vice — or you feel 
that your heart is full of sin. Are you not ashamed 
of it? "With God Almighty watching for you, with 
angels solicitous for you when you fall, rejoicing when 
you rise, can you continue in sin, and turn your face 
from God ! Or will you not be moved, impelled, and 
inspired by this very sympathy to renounce your sin 
and rise to newer life? There are great joys in this 
earth, but the deepest joy is that of turning from the 
evil to the good, and when that deepest and truest joy 
springs up in your heart, remember there is joy in 
heaven. 



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$4.00. Reprinted from the English edition. 

These volumes may have been suggested by Coleridge's 
Table Talk, and are in a vein quite similar to the papers 
furnished by the "Autocrat of the Breakfast-table," though 
the vein lies much deeper here than there. There is a thread 
of narrative on which the discussions are strung, and the 
topics are selected from life, and treated with great variety— 
some of them with philosophical discernment, skill, ami 
thoroughness. The style is always pure, and the discussions 
dignified, through the most familiar and animated colloquies 
while the dashes of humor impart geniality and zest. The 
volumes are always entertaining and suggestive, whether read 
consecutively or taken up and opened at random for half 
&□ hour's literary recreation. — Freewill Baptist Quarterly. 



JAMES MILLER, Publisher, 

BROADWAY, NEW YORK 



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VALUABLE BOOKS FOR FAMILIES AND SCHOOLS. 



Science of Familiar Things. A GUIDE TO THE SCIENTIFIC 

KNOWLEDGE OF THINGS FAMILIAR. By the Rev. Dr. Brewer. Head 
Master of Kind's College School. Norwich. Carefully revised and adapted 
for use in Families and Schools in the United States. One thick volume. 

Price $1 25 

This Volume contains about 2.000 Questions and Answers, explaining, in the 

nost concise and intelligible manner, the phenomena of every-day occurrence. 

It contains an amount of useful information never before collected in a shape 

»o convenient for study, and so easy for reference. 

Extract from Preface. — "No science is generally more interesting than that which 
ixplains the common phenomena of life. We see that salt and snow are both white, a 
rose red, leaves green, and the violet a deep purple; bnt how few persons ever ask the 
reason why! We know that a flute produces a musical sound, and a cracked bell a dis 
cordant one — that fire is hot, ice cold, and a candle luminous — that water boils when sub 
jected to heat, and freezes from cold; but when a child looks up into our face and asks us 
1 why,' — how many times is it silenced with a frown, or called 1 very foolish for asking such 
silly questions!' The object of the present book is to explain about two thousand of these 
questions, (which are often more easily asked than answered,) in language so simple that 
a child may understand it, yet not so childish as to offend the scientific. In order to secure 
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sulted, and each edition has been submitted to the revision of gentlemen of acknowledged 
reputation for scientific attainments. The almost unparalleled success of this little volume, 
5f which 120,000 copies have been printed since the year 1S4S, is an incontrovertible proof 
of its acceptability; and has induced the author to spare neither labor nor expense to ren- 
der his k Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar 1 instructive and amusing 
to the young, as well as to those of maturer life. 

A Course of English Reading. Adapted to Various Tastes 

and Capacities. Based on the Man ual of Rev. J. Pt/croft, of Trinity College, 
Oxford Bv J. A. Spencer. S. T. D., of the College of the City of New 
York. \2mc cloth. Price 8125 

" Never too Late to Learn." 

Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence, in Speaking, Pro 

nouruung. and Writing the English Language, Corrected. 

"Which— if you but open- 
Ton will be unwilling, 
For many a shilling, 
To part with the profit 
Which you shall have of it." 

(The Key to Unknown Knmcle'lge. —London, 1569. ' 

Ifcmo, eloth extra. Price .80 cts 

New Work on Synonyms. 

Hand-Book of English Synonyms, and Proverbs and Plirase? 
from the Latin. French, Spanish, and Italian Languages. With Tables of 
Weights and Measures, and the Value of Money of all Commercial Nations 
16mo, cloth. Price SI 00 

Maca4'lay's Lays of Ancient Rome. A Classic Reader. 
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Drawing Book for Young Children. Containing One Hundred 
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Plato's Phaedo ; or, TTie Immortality of the Soul. Translated 
from the Greek, by Charles S. Stanford. With a Life of Plato, by Arch- 
bishop Fenelon. 12mo, cloth. Price $1 25 

Paley's Evidences of Christianity. With Annotations by 
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Rochefoucauld's Maxims and Moral Reflections; also, Shaks 

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The Gentleman's Letter-Writer. Embodying Letters of Love 
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The Parlor Letter-Writer. Original and Selected, to which is 
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Universalist and Unitarian 
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Would respectfully state that he is the 

ISTZE^TV YORK .A. G- IE TNT T 

of the 

UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE, 

( 23 O S T O 3NT y ) 

and also of the 

American Unitarian Association, 

(BOSTON.) 

All Publications of these houses are kept in stock, 
and furnished at their prices and terms, 

James Miller, 

779 tgrocuZvsrcLy, 1ST. T. 

(Opp. A. T. Stewart & Co.) 



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LIST OF 

JUVENILE PUBLICATIONS. 



Adventures m Fairy Land. By Richard Henry Stoddard. 

With Engravings, from designs by Oertel, and others. A charming Eook of 
Fairy Tales for the young. i6mo, cloth, profusely illustrated $1 OO 

JEsop's Fables in Words of One Syllable. By Mary 

Godolphin. Large type. Colored illustrations. Told in very simple language 
for children learning to read, i vol., cloth 1 OO 

Afloat in the Forest ; or, A Voyage Among the Tree Tops. 

By Captain Mayne Reid. i2mo, fully illustrated, neatly bound in cloth, 
extra, -.,.«. - 1 25 

All for the Best ; or, The Old Peppermint Man. A Moral 

Tale. By T. S. Arthur. Should be in every Sunday Scnool Library. Illus- 
trated, i6mo. cloth, 75 

Andersen, (Hans Christian.) 

Stories for Children, as follows : 

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i6mo, cloth, $ 75 

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cloth 7 F 

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cloth 75 

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cloth 75 

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The above is the best and most complete edition of the celebrated Fairy Tales 
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Aimwell Stories for Girls (The). 3 vols, illustrated... ...$3 75 

ELLA. JESSIE. MARCUS. 

These three volumes are part of the celebrated Aimwell Stories. Well known 
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Sllllbeam Stories. By Miss Planche. 4 vols., as follows : 

—Cloud with a Silver Lining, and other Stories. Illustrat- 
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—Dream Chintz, and other Stories. Illustrated, i6mo, 

cloth, extra 1 00 

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extra 1 00 

—Trap to catch a Sunbeam, and other Stories. Illustrated, 

i6mo, cloth, extra 1 00 

The only American Edition of these exquisite stories, by an author whose 
popularity is greater than ever, and whose works have sold almost equal to 
any writer of the present day. 

Rainbows for Children. Edited by L. Maria Child. With 

illustrations, i6mo, cloth, extra , 1 25 

This is a very beautiful selection of Tales, by Mrs. Child, suitable for any 
child. 

Simple Susan, and other Stories. By Maria Edgeworth. Il- 
lustrated, square i6mo, cloth 75 

Waste Not, Want Not, and other Tales. By Maria Edge- 
worth. Illustrated, square iomo, cloth, extra 75 

These are splendid Moral Tales for Girls from twelve to sixteen, and can be 
read by any one. 

Paul and Virginia. Translated from the French of Bernardin 

de St. Pierre. Profusely illustrated. i6mo, cloth, extra 1 00 

Too well known to need any description. 

Sophie May's Books, (Any volume sold separate.} 

■ — Dottie Dimple Series. Complete in six volumes. Illustrated. 

Per volume 75 

Dotty Dimple at her Grandmother's. Dotty Dimple at Home. Dotty 
Dimple out West. Dotty Dimple at Play. Dotty Dimple at School. 
Dotty Dimple's Flyaway. 

— Flaxie Frizzle Stories. To be completed in six volumes. 

Illustrated. Per volume 75 

Flaxie Frizzle. Doctor Papa. Little Pitchers. 



PUBLISHED BY JAMES MILLER, NEW YORK. 



Swiss Family Robinson ; or, Adventures of a Father, Mother, 

and Four Sons, on a Desert Island. Completein one volume. Illustrated. 121110, 
cloth $1 00 

Tail Of a Mouse (The). With ten full-page illustrations. 

1 vol., quarto, cloth 75 

Thiodolph, the Icelander, Translated from the German of De 

LaMotte Fouque. Cloth 1 25 

Thousand and One Stories of Fact and Fancy, Wit, and 

Humor, Rhyme, Reason, and Romance. By Peter Parley. Illustrated by one 
hundred and fifty Engravings. One vol., crown 8vo, tinted paper, cloth 1 50 

Tom Randall; or, The Way to Success. By "Alfred Old- 

fellow," Author of "Joe Nichols; or Difficulties overcome" etc. Illustrated, 
i6mo, cloth, extra. IOO 

Undine, The Water Spirit. Translated from the Ger- 
man of De La Motte Fouque, Illustrated, i6mo, cloth 1 OO 

Undine and Sintram. Translated from the German of De La 

Motte Fouque. These two classics stories are complete in one volume. Illus- 
trated, i2mo, cloth, extra 1 25 

Uncle Nat ; or The Good Time which George and Frank 

had, Trapping, Fishing, Camping Out, etc. By " Alfred Oldfellow." Author of 
'Tom Randall, or the Way to Success" etc. Illustrated, 1 6 rnc , cloth, extra. 1 OO 

Washington's Boyhood and Manhood. By Mrs. Anna M. 

Hyde. With sixteen illustrations. i2mo, cloth, extra 1 25 

Waste Not, Want Not ; and other Tales. By Maria Edge- 

worth. Illustrated. Square. i6mo, cloth, extra 75 

Water Lily. By Harriet Myrtle. With twenty beautiful 

Illustrations by Hablot K. Brownie 75 

Young Voyagers ; or, The Boy Hunters in the North. By 

Captain Mayne Reid. Illustrated. i2mo, cloth, extra 1 2o 

Young Yagers ; or, A Narrative of Hunting Adventure in 

Southern Africa. By Captain Mayne Reid. With twelve illustrations by Har- 
vey. 1 2mo, cloth, extra 1 25 



PUBLISHED BY JAMES MILLER, NEW YORK. 



Robin Hood and His Merry Foresters. By Stephen Percy. 

i6mo, cloth, illustrated , $ 75 

Robinson Crusoe's Life and Adventures. Illustrated. i6mo, 

cloth, extra, The cheapest edition in the market 60 

Sandford and Merton. An Instructive and Moral Lesson for 

the Young. A new Edition. Illustrated. i6mo, cloth 1 00 

Sandford and Merton, in Words of One Syllable. By Mary 

Godolphin. Large Type. Colored illustrations. i vol., cloth 100 

Very easy reading for beginners. 

Santa Claus (A Visit from). By Clement C. Moore, With 

illustrations by Scattergood. i vol., quarto, beautifully illuminated cover... 30 

Simple Susan, and Other Stories. By Maria Edgeworth. II. 

lustrated. Square i6mo, cloth , 75 

Slovenly Kate ; and other Pleasing Stories and Funny Pictures. 

Translated from the German. Uniform with the famous "Laughter Book." 
Colored illustrations, quarto, cloth 1 75 

Stories about Animals ; and Reynard the Fox. Edited by 

Captain Mayne Reid. Illustrated profusely. i2mo, cloth, extra .1 25 

Story of Cecil and his Dog. Translated from the French of 

" Little Robinson in Paris." Illustrated. i6mo, cloth. 1 OO 

Story without an End. Translated from the German. 1 8mo, 

cloth 50 

Sunbeam Stories. By Miss Planche. 4 vols., as follows :— 

—Cloud with a Silver Lining, and other Stories. Illustrat- 
ed, i6mo, cloth, extra 1 ©O 

—Dream Chintz, and other Stories. Illustrated, i6mo, 

cloth^ extra 1 OO 

—Old JollifFe; and other Stories. Illustrated, i6mo, cloth, 

extra 1 OO 

—Trap to catch a Sunbeam, and other Stories Illustrated, 

i6mo, cloth, extra 1 OO 

The only American Edition of these exquisite stories, by an Author whose popu- 
larity is greater than ever. 



PUBLISHED BY JAMES MILLER, NEW YORK. 



Enchanting Library. By the Brothers Grimm and Hans 

Andersen. 5 vols. Illustrated, , $5 OO 

Andersen's F-iiry Tales. Andersen's Wonderful Tales. Andersen's Story 
Book. Grimm's German Fairy Tales. Grimm's Home Fairy Tales. 

Grimm's Fairy Library. 4 vols. i6mo. Illustrated, cloth,3 00 

Brave Little Tailor. King of the Swans. Golden Bird. The Three 
Brothers. 

Grimm's Household Library. 3 vols., i6mo, illustrated. 

cloth, 3 OO 

German Fairy Tales. Fairy Tales and Legends. Home Fairy Tales. 

Good Boy's Library. 4 vols. Illustrated. Cloth, 120 

Good Girl's Library. 4 vols. Illustrated. Cloth, 1 20 

Home Twilight Stories (The). 4 vols,, i6mo, illustrated, 

cloth, 3 OO 

Briery Wood, and Other Stories. Much Ado About Nothing. The Hero 
Without Courage. The Young Fortune Seekers. 

Oldfellow Library . 3 vols., i6mo, cloth, black and 

gold, 3 00 

Joe Nichols, or Difficulties Overcome. Tom Randall, or the Way to Success 
Uncle Nat. 

Our Pet's Library. 4 vols, Illustrated, 240 

Parley's Fireside Library. 3 vols., i2mo, illustrated, 

cloth, 4 50 

Camp-Fires of the Revolution. Parley's Merry Stories. Parley's Thousanc. 
and One Stories. 

Popular Fairy Library (The). 4 vols. i6mo. Illustrated, 
Cloth, 3 00 

Favorite Fairy Tales. Famous Fairy Tales. Popular Fairy Tales Robin 
Hood and His Merry Men. 

Sunbeam Library. 4 vols., i6mo, illustrated, cloth, 

extra, 4 OO 

Cloud with Silver Lining. Dream Chintz. Old Joliffe. Trap to Catch a 
Sunbeam. 

Thayer (William M.) Youth's History of the Rebellion. 

4 vols , i2mo., illustrated, cloth, , , 5 OO 

Fort Sumter to Roanoke Island. Roanoke Island to Murfreesboro'. Murfrees- 
boro' to Fort Pillow. Fort Pillow to the End. 



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